Winner of the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, this now classic collection of essays focuses on three often-overlooked elements of contemporary poetry: its depth of feeling and imagination; its high degree of often-concealed craft; and its connectedness with tradition.

U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass considers some of the twentiethcentury poets who bring him pleasure: Robert Lowll, JamesWright, Tomas Transtromer, Joseph Brodsky, Yvor Winters, Robert Creeley, James McMichael, Czeslaw Milosz, and others, in this, his first collection of essays. Originally published in1984, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry won theNational Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. A new collection of Robert Hass's essays will be published by Ecco in 1998.