Third Commonness

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.

In Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography, from Zen Buddhist poetry to California Ecopoetry, from Walt Whitman to T.S. Eliot, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through various essays and lectures, Third Commonness is as much a book of literary criticism as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves these histories together with the boundless hand of a writer inseparable from modern American literature. "Here it is, this stretch of it," he says. Sometimes there is a requiem, other times-a romance or a political reckoning. Always we return to poetry, which encounters itself over and over again, beckoned into being by some "propelling force."