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 things at length.

Deliberately old-fashioned in his criticism, Pinsky writes like an unregenerate theologian insisting upon the validity of Natural Law. The source of his Natural Law is not the axiom of Being but the human predicament which he announces, several times, as that of conscious life in an unconscious world, of men and women confronting a mute universe. The attitudes to this predicament are likely to be few and continuous. But we are compelled to ask Pinsky: are we merely deluded, then, in finding some poems radically different, formally discontinuous?

On a statistical count, Pinsky is clearly right to maintain that contemporary poetry shows more continuity than change…. Why not settle for the probability of continuity while secretly fearing or longing for change, a formula as ecumenical as anything I can devise?…

Generally, his comments are brief, vivid, distinct without claiming finality, and his taste is excellent. (p. 14)