[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, will remind readers that here is a poet who, without forming a mini-movement or setting himself loudly at odds with the dominant tendencies of American poetry, has brought into it something new—beginning with his first volume, Sadness and Happiness (1975), and gathering authority with each subsequent book. Call it a way of being autobiographical without being confessional, of connecting the particulars of the self—his Jewishness; his 1940's and 50's childhood in Long Branch, N.J.; his adult life as "professor or / Poet or parent or writing conference pooh-bah"—with the largest intellectual concerns of history, culture, psychology and art.

Poetry has become so disconnected from the other literary arts that we don't usually look for a poet to share important affinities except with other poets. But one of Mr. Pinsky's great accomplishments is the way he recoups for poetry some of the pleasures of prose: storytelling, humor, the rich texture of a world filled with people and ideas. In its free and vigorous play of mind, his "Essay on Psychiatrists" really is an essay, a witty, clear-eyed 21-part argument that moves from a group portrait of psychiatrists as a bourgeois social type (liberal politics, B'nai B'rith, "a place on the Cape with Marimekko drapes") to a large and fully earned conclusion: "But it is all bosh, the false / Link between genius and sickness."

A full accounting of his literary connections would have to include Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick—Jewish novelists with whom he shares a wide variety of concerns. There's the fascination with fables and rabbinic lore ("The Rhyme of Reb Nachman," "From the Childhood of Jesus," the jewel-like prose tale "Jesus and Isolt"). There's the nostalgic love-hatred for the stifling familial urgencies of the now-vanished world of lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants and the celebration of the talismans—movies, pop music, comics, sports—by which those immigrants' children defined themselves as Americans. In "The Night Game," Mr. Pinsky recalls himself as a child imagining a Jewish southpaw "Even more gifted / Than Whitey Ford" who refuses to pitch on Yom Kippur. The long poem "History of My Heart" begins with his mother remembering Fats Waller improvising on a piano "the size of a lady's jewel box or a wedding cake" in the toy department of Macy's, that symbol of democratic glamour. In "A Woman," a grandmother figure attempts to instill in a child her own Old World suspicions and terrors as they walk through an ordinary Long Branch day that seems to range across centuries—from the "imbecile / Panic of the chickens" slaughtered in the market to the purchase of a uniquely American treat, a milkshake. Although the poem ends with the child's vow "Never to forgive her" for holding him back from a Halloween parade, what it shows is that the woman's half-mad smotherings and warnings have awakened the child to self-awareness and a heightened perception of the world. As the title suggests, she's a muse.

It is not surprising that Mr. Pinsky, whose last book was a widely praised translation of Dante's Inferno into modern terza rima, should have large ambitions for his own poems. Even the titles of his books proclaim his intention to grapple with major themes: Sadness and Happiness, An Explanation of America, History of My Heart, Poetry and the World. One of the earliest poems collected here, "Poem About People," is a tragicomic meditation on humanity itself:

     In the movies, when the sensitive
     Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns
     Trying to rescue the thrashing
     Anti-semitic bully, swimming across
     The river raked by nazi fire,
     The awful part is the part truth:
     Hate my whole kind, but me.
     Love me for myself.

The determination with which the early poems set themselves in opposition to the then-dominant confessional mode in favor of the ironic, the didactic, the "discursive" (to use Mr. Pinsky's own term) can make them seem dry or willed today, a bit like the benign and prudent therapists cautiously lauded in "Essay on Psychiatrists." It is really with History of My Heart (1984) that Mr. Pinsky finds a way of making a poem that is, well, poetical, that makes images and the connections—or gaps—between images bear a meaning whose emotional resonance derives in part from its indeterminacy. "The New Saddhus" imagines a multicultural assortment of middle-aged men, "Kurd, Celt, Marxist and Rotarian," setting out on a mysterious pilgrimage. Is it a rejection of breadwinning and family life, or a new bend in the masculine (and why only masculine?) life path? In the poem "The Figured Wheel," what is that fantastically decorated juggernaut that rolls over teeming, unresisting humanity—language, culture, history? The way all three both create and destroy? These images have a vitality, a strangeness that overflows interpretation.

Similarly, "Shirt" is a kind of free-associative catalogue that encompasses technical sewing terms, Asian sweatshop workers "Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break," the Triangle factory fire, Hart Crane, the invention of tartans, Southern slavery and more. A shirt, it would seem, is a kind of poem:

      George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
      Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
      And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
      And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
      Both her and me.

"Shirt" is a dazzling bravura performance, but it suggests a risk attached to the Whitman stance of "I am large, I contain multitudes." I'm not so sure that Irma is as happy to inspect that shirt as Mr. Pinsky is to wear it. There are times in these poems when one feels that Wordsworth's egotistical sublime is trying very hard—too hard—to be Keats's negative capability, and that what is presented as a kind of grand vision of humanity is a version of self-delight. As with Whitman, as with the Eastern philosophies that furnish him with so many gorgeous examples and metaphors, there's a potential for coldness in Mr. Pinsky's wide-angle vision.

Most of the time, though, the poems of his maturity manage their startling shifts and juxtapositions in ways that give intellectual and sensuous delight. You can read "At Pleasure Bay" a dozen times and still feel a kind of delicious surprise at the way Mr. Pinsky moves from the 1927 double suicide of "the Chief of Police and Mrs. W." through music and bootlegging and boats and Unity Mitford's infatuation with Hitler, all the way to reincarnation—the whole ultimately unfathomable round of violence, passion, beauty and sorrow that is human experience coming back always a little different, like the catbird in the willows singing "never the same phrase twice." Who else could have written "The Refinery," in which ancient animal gods from the collective unconscious wake up and take a train to the factory of language (imagined as a kind of petroleum, pressed out of human history while they were sleeping)? Or the recent "Impossible to Tell," which moves between the 17th-century Japanese poet Basho and a friend's sudden death, gives full-dress and very funny versions of two Jewish jokes and—while positing that human existence resembles a renga, a Japanese interlinked poetical form—is itself a kind of renga.

What makes Mr. Pinsky such a rewarding and exciting writer is the sense he gives, in the very shape and structure of his poems, of getting at the depths of human experience, in which everything is always repeated but also always new. The feathery and furry tribal gods, Jesus, Basho, the frail old people who came to his father for eyeglasses, Shiva and Parvati, the chief and Mrs. W. and Robert Pinsky himself are all characters in a story that has no end and possibly no ultimate meaning either but to which we listen spellbound because, like the figured wheel covered with mysterious symbols, it is our story.