Politics & Power Quote by Robert Hass

Hass is smuggling a radical claim into a plainspoken sentence: poetry isn’t a decorative art, it’s a civic instrument. Not “political” in the bumper-sticker sense, but political the way oxygen is political when the air is getting thin. The key verb is “refresh.” He’s not promising to invent justice or preach it into existence; he’s arguing that our sense of justice decays under routine pressure - bureaucracy, euphemism, exhaustion, the daily incentives to look away. Justice doesn’t get defeated in a dramatic coup. It goes “dead” through small, constant neglect.

The line works because it treats moral perception as something physical and perishable. “In us” is the sting: Hass won’t let readers outsource the problem to corrupt leaders or distant systems. The drift happens inside the self, in language and attention. Poetry’s job, then, is to restore sensitivity - to make the familiar intolerable again, to force a re-seeing. That’s politics at the level where politics is formed: the imagination, the range of what we can feel and therefore what we can demand.

Context matters: Hass comes of age amid Vietnam, environmental crisis, and a late-20th-century American skepticism toward grand moral narratives. His work often lingers on landscape and intimacy, yet this sentence insists that lyric attention is not escapism. It’s training for conscience. In an era that rewards speed and certainty, he pitches poetry as a counter-institution: slow language that reactivates judgment before justice becomes just another dead word.