[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 poet who bridges Dante and the Internet, has been named the nation's next poet laureate. The selection is being announced today by the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, who cited Mr. Pinsky's mastery of computers as well as his translations and "his own probing poetry."

Like the last 8 of his 38 predecessors, the 56-year-old Mr. Pinsky will also carry the title of consultant in poetry, but there are few statutory duties for the pay ($35,000) outside of organizing several literary programs, readings and talks. Laureates, however, have used their two-year platform since 1937 to foster poetry in schools, workshops and cityscapes and to enhance the library's archives. The reigning laureate, Robert Hass, who bows out with a final lecture on May 1, crisscrossed the country taking the measure of literacy at citizen forums and Rotary Clubs and, not incidentally, collecting snippets of impromptu haiku from passers-by.

Mr. Pinsky, a professor of graduate writing at Boston University who propelled Dante onto the best-seller lists with his acclaimed 1994 verse translation of the Inferno, said in an interview in New York yesterday that he might take a tack from his classes and ask a broad spectrum of Americans, including powers that be in Washington, to read and record their favorite poems for the library. "What would President Clinton or Al Gore pick?" he asked. "Or Jesse Helms?"

"If people ask in 1,000 years who Americans were, this might help them figure it out," he said. Although poetry seems to be in some vogue, cropping up in movies and ever more popular public readings, Mr. Pinsky said it was still widely manhandled in schools.

"Teachers have pedagogically treated poems as an occasion to say something smart," he said. But poetry, he said, is as simple as art on an individual scale, its medium a single human voice. That, he said, is the secret of poetry's "immense power in an age of arts dominated by mechanical reproduction."

Not that Mr. Pinsky has anything against modern technology. He is the poetry editor of the Internet magazine Slate (at http://www.slate.com), and as a certifiable computer pioneer wrote a 1984 interactive "text adventure" [Mindwheel] modeled loosely on the Inferno. "A side of me wants to try anything," he said.

In fact, he has commented, poetry and computers share two key attributes, speed and memory. "They share," he wrote, "the great human myth of trope, an image that could be called the secret passage: the discovery of large, manifold channels through a small ordinary-looking or all but invisible aperture."

And anyway, he asked, what is poetry but technology that uses the human body? He also likens poetry to ice-skating with its daring leaps and flashing vistas.

If Mr. Pinsky's translation of the Inferno popularized his name, the work becoming a selection of the Book of the Month Club and a best seller, he has long been highly regarded in literary circles for his five books of poetry since 1975 (Sadness and Happiness, An Explanation of America, History of My Heart, The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel); three books of prose (Landor's Poetry, The Situation of Poetry, Poetry and the World) and a translation of The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz. He was at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Boston last week giving a reading from The Figured Wheel, his latest collection, published last year and just now coming out in paperback, when calls reached him about his appointment.

He achieved his translation of Dante without a scholar's knowledge of Italian. "My work is not a work of scholarship," he said. "It's a work of metrical engineering."

Poetry gripped him from youth in Long Branch, N.J., he recalled, although his was not a literary family. His father was an optician and his grandfather. David Pinsky, was a small-time prizefighter, tavern-owner and bootlegger. But even before he know what poetry was, he said, he savored the sounds of words like the conductor's cry: "Passengers going to Hoboken, change trains at Summit."

At Rutgers University he wrote out Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" and taped it to a wall. Why? "It was the speed with which he covered the ground," Mr. Pinsky said. "Wow: 'artifice of eternity'!"

After college, he received a graduate fellowship at Stanford and taught English at the University of California at Berkeley before moving to Boston University, where, he said, he hopes to continue teaching after taking office in October. He and his wife, Ellen, a clinical psychologist, have three grown daughters.

He takes his poetic inspiration from everywhere and anything, he said. "If you look at this Tropicana container," he said, lifting it from the table, "when did they start putting paraffin on the carton and the fluttering banner here? If you could understand that, you might understand a lot of Western history." His poems seem hard to classify, ranging widely over Judeo-Christian themes, autobiography and genre scenes. "I like human artifacts," he said.

Being used to a noisy, crowded household, he says, he writes fast and almost anywhere, even in airports. "I can easily get a mass of clay on the table," he said, although he added that the last 20 percent could entail many drafts.

He plays the saxophone, and is an avid baseball fan and Red Sox rooter, by way of the Brooklyn Dodgers. "Being a Dodger fan is good preparation for being a Red Sox fan," he said.

Both teams, he said, exemplify "values deeper than success."

He said he was proud to follow many of his icons, including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Conrad Aiken, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Robert Penn Warren. But he is also glad, he said, that the job description has expanded from just plain poet laureate to consultant in poetry as well.

"It's a greater distinction to be consulted than to be laureled," he said.