In the following essay, Parini offers a positive assessment of An Explanation of America, praising his unique and original verse.
Robert Pinsky's book-length poem An Explanation of America f...
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In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture at the Napa Poetry Conference in August, 1984, Pinsky outlines the social responsibilities of poets.
Certain general ideas come up repeated...
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In the following excerpt, Corn deems Pinsky's poetry "accurate, truthful, conscientious" and compares his work to that of Walt Whitman.
We can doubt that the book [An Explanati...
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In the following review, Sacks lauds the "openness" of Pinsky's poetry.
With his two most recent collections of prose and poetry, Robert Pinsky enlarges his role as one of cont...
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In the following essay, Longenbach traces the development of Pinsky's unique poetic vision.
Robert Pinsky has always stood apart from the various schisms used to map the world of American po...
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In the following interview conducted by several people, Pinsky discusses the problems of translating poetry, the influence of Judaism and Eastern philosophy on his writing, and his poetic philosophy.
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In the following favorable review of The Figured Wheel, Longenbach deems the collection "the most scrupulously intelligent body of work produced by an American poet in the past twenty-five year...
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In the following review, Pollitt provides a laudatory review of Pinsky's collected poems, The Figured Wheel.
Robert Pinsky's extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful volume of colle...
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Critical Essay by Charles Molesworth
Robert Pinsky is a balanced critic, and furthermore he knows that merely avoiding the dangers of partisanship or scrupulosity can produce a limply, or even glibly...
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Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue
The mind at work in "The Situation of Poetry" is lively, fresh and critical without being obsessed by the rigor of criticism…. Immensely well-rea...
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Critical Essay by Blake Morrison
[An Explanation of America] is not quite so presumptuous as it sounds. If an explanation of America is to be had from it at all, it's not one that can be quick...
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Critical Essay by John Fuller
[Robert Pinsky's] An Explanation of America is perhaps rather less interesting than his earlier work: the air of infinitely calm and insidious rumination riding u...
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Critical Essay by Michael Hamburger
Not the least remarkable thing about Robert Pinsky's remarkable [An Explanation of America] is that it seems to defy not only all the dominant trends in con...
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Critical Essay by James Finn Cotter
In its philosophical approach, classical learning, and orderly structure, [An Explanation of America] resembles the work of William Cullen Bryant more than that of...
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Critical Essay by David Kalstone
It may be, as William Carlos Williams observed, that "the pure products of America go crazy." But Robert Pinsky in his ambitious and immensely likable l...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Yenser
[In An Explanation of America Pinsky] organizes rigorously: a brief prefatory lyric and a concluding dedicatory elegy frame the title poem, fifty-five pages long, whi...
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Corey is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following review, a portion of which appeared in CLC-38, he praises Pinsky for the depth of his insights and for not succumbing to sentimentalit...
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In the following essay, Pinsky discusses the theme of horror in Canto XXV of The Inferno. Pinsky also presents his translation of the Canto, demonstrating how he handles Dante's terza rima rhym...
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Ahern is an American educator and noted Dante scholar. In the following favorable review of The Inferno of Dante, he discusses the difficulties of rendering into English Dante's "vulgar ...
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Hirsch is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following review, he favorably assesses The Inferno of Dante, contending that Pinsky's translation is "fast-paced, idiomatic, and...
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In the following essay, Schemo discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Pinsky's translation. She also reports on Pinsky's reaction to the attention The Inferno of Dante has received.
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In the following review of The Inferno of Dante, Kart compares Pinsky's translation with that of C. H. Sisson, finding Pinsky's inferior.
Robert Pinsky (The Want Bone, History of My H...
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Mitchell is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following review, he praises Pinsky's poetic ambitions and the combination of "boldness" and "restraint" i...
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Libby is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt from a review in which he examines Pinsky's Poetry and the World and Terrence Des Pres's Praises and Dispraises, Politi...
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In the following favorable review of Poetry and the World, Brown summarizes Pinsky's main critical points and contends that the book's most interesting pieces are the ones which relate m...
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Breslin is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt from a review of Pinsky's Poetry and the World and J. D. McClatchy's White Paper: On Contemporary American Poe...
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McClatchy is an American poet, critic, and educator whose books of poetry include The Rest of the Way (1990). In the following review of The Want Bone, he concludes that Pinsky writes "poems as...
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Corn is an American poet, critic, translator, and educator. In the following highly positive review of The Want Bone, he lauds Pinsky for his "wonderful ear for poetic line" and the ways...
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In the following positive review of The Want Bone, Bogen hails Pinsky's ability to incorporate a multitude of images, motifs, and styles into his poetry without dissipating his main thematic co...
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In the following excerpt from a review in which he examines Pinsky's The Want Bone, Irena Klepfisz's A Few Words in the Mother Tongue (1990), and Jerome Rothenberg's Khurbn, and O...
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In the following interview, which was conducted originally on February 2, 1993 in Thomas's classroom at Davidson College, Pinsky discusses the art of translation, the cultural ways Judaism affe...
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In the essay below, Longenbach traces Pinsky's artistic development in terms of the poet's "deep awareness—sometimes wariness, sometimes worship"—of historica...
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In the essay below, Pinsky contemplates the social contexts of American poetry in contemporary America, tracing the development of its various manifestations and emphasizing the individual scale of it...
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Below, Pollitt admires the freshness of Pinsky's verse in The Figured Wheel.
Robert Pinsky's extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful volume of collected poems, The Figured Wheel, w...
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In the following essay, Blumenthal provides an overview of Pinsky's life and career, reporting his response to being named poet laureate of the United States.
Robert Pinsky, a prize-winning ...
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In the essay below, Mehren summarizes the achievements of Pinsky's life and career, focusing on his passion for making poetry accessible to the masses.
A small smile brightened Robert Pinsky...
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Below, Glück explains the ways a narrative impulse informs Pinsky's poetics, comparing his poetry with that of Stephen Dobyns.
The poet Stephen Dobyns, who is also the novelist Stephe...
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Katharine Weber puts her stories together like piecework, like the work done by the two sisters in Triangle, one a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire of 1911, the other killed by it (alon...
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Katharine Weber puts her stories together like piecework, like the work done by the two sisters in Triangle, one a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire of 1911, the other killed by it (alon...
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Hyperbolic titles invite dissent. So here’s mine: What makes Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” “the poem that changed America,” as the cover of this essay collection procl...
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Hyperbolic titles invite dissent. So here’s mine: What makes Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” “the poem that changed America,” as the cover of this essay collection proc...
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