Robert Pinsky belongs to the visionary American tradition of poets such as Walt Whitman, Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg. He is above all preoccupied with the possibilities that American democracy offers to individuals as they shape the spiritual, imaginative and material aspects of their lives. He is an autobiographical poet only insofar as the stories of his own life can be seen as illustrative of the larger patterns of American life, and he consistently places those stories beside those of other citizens of the democratic experiment, attentive to both the differences and similarities between them. He does not hark back to the ideology of the “melting pot” (which would have generations of immigrants slough off their ancestral ethnicities and religions), but rather explores how these…
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Citation: Quinn, Justin. "Robert Pinsky". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 November 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3569, accessed 19 April 2024.]
