The mind at work in "The Situation of Poetry" is lively, fresh and critical without being obsessed by the rigor of criticism…. Immensely well-read in contemporary poetry, Pinsky moves among those poems on the assumption that traditional themes are still valid. He believes, and is pleased to show, that contemporary poetry exhibits more continuity than change…. According to his sense of life and literature, the important things do not change, presumably because he identifies the important things as those that do not change. (pp. 6, 14)

So for Pinsky the basic procedures of poetry are still in office: description, meditation, statement, predication, the logic of consequence. Circumstances remain pretty much the same, and perhaps "the range of emotional responses to the subject have not varied much, either—though the stylistic responses have varied, enormously." I am not convinced by the logic of that sentence, incidentally, but Pinsky does not argue...