Tony Hoagland: Obsession, The Creative Wound, and the Deployment of Talent (July 2000)

Poets, too, are subject to the American commandment to “change, change, change,” Tony Hoagland notes. Yet we are also limited by “the relatively fixed facts of self and talent.” Looking at the work of three he calls “especially chameleon poets”—Robert Hass, Louise Glück, and Robert Pinsky—he considers how they “figure and reconfigure [their] passionate intelligence” over the arcs of their careers, and finds, in the ways they change and don’t change, lessons for how writers can think about genuine artistic growth.