In its philosophical approach, classical learning, and orderly structure, [An Explanation of America] resembles the work of William Cullen Bryant more than that of Hart Crane, but it is not old fashioned. It is as American as Bryant's and Crane's long poems, as embedded in the past, and as identified with the woods and prairies. Does America have an explanation? More basically, Pinsky says, we need to ask: Is there a country to explain? Yes, but not out there: in our own imaginations and dreams, in the unconscious Self made conscious by poetry which gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. In fact, Pinsky finds the paradigm for his poem in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale which he calls "A Romance of implausible rebirths." The definition applies to America where the old world serves as womb for the new: Greece and Rome, England, Spain, and Russia serve their ingredients into Pinsky's pot. He is too modest to pretend his poem to be an epic; instead, he writes it as a letter to his daughter who by happy chance plays a part in a school revival of The Winter's Tale. Images reappear repeatedly in the mirror, past into present, public to private, concrete to universal…. He directs his explanation through local history and landscapes, generations on the land and in cities, in their waking and dreaming life. (pp. 144-45)

We must be "naked, free, and final" to frame words "as if speaking from the past/Into the void or mystery of the future." Pinsky come close to fulfilling the ideal himself when, at the close, the poem itself recedes into the past, having offered for our quiet reading a work very much like the country it explains, "not a mystic home/But something—if it must be imaginary—/Chosen from life, and useful." Something we look for in all the poetry we read. (p. 145)