Style as theme: Robert Hass's poetry and his search for the void

Robert Hass's poems address the emptiness found between the word and what it signifies, between imagination and experience, and between language and reality. In Field Guide, his first book of poetry, he discovers this void as he focuses on the power of words and names. In his next book, Praise, he directly explores the emptiness and how it reveals the word as elegy to what it represents. In Human Wishes, his third book of poetry, he redefines imagination, reality, and the ubiquitous emptiness through a process of simplification that uses common nouns and plainer intentions. His desire to constantly address this theme of emptiness throughout his poetry has led to a style of writing that continuously upends the reader's expectations.