The temptation of art

It’s hard to know what to expect of great poets late in their careers. Will they mature or regress, innovate or self-imitate? Allen Ginsberg kept the spirit of his youth but lost its mind. Wallace Stevens refined both, writing lines such as “We make a dwelling in the evening air/ In which being there together is enough,” with a mystic’s vision and a man’s doubt and a child’s stubborn wonder. Some older poets find different dreams to chase. A middle-aged T.S. Eliot wrote that “Old men ought to be explorers,” and he spent his old age writing about cats.
If it is worrisome when a poet seems to lose his touch, it is great fun when he plays on our worries. This is the rhetorical hustle with which Robert Hass begins his new book. Hass is nearly seventy, and The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems begins with a strange new poem, “July Notebook: The Birds,” whose title suggests laziness and a self-mimicry that is almost self-mockery.