Robert Pinsky

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Poetry and the World

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SOURCE: A review of Poetry and the World, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn, 1989, pp. 751-52.

[In the following favorable review of Poetry and the World, Brown summarizes Pinsky's main critical points and contends that the book's most interesting pieces are the ones which relate memories of Pinsky's childhood and family.]

[Poetry and the World is a] mixed salad indeed, but one which is deftly tossed and agreeably seasoned. Robert Pinsky flings into the bowl the most varied ingredients: recollections of his youth in Long Branch, New Jersey; a commentary on some passages of Isaiah memorized for his Bar Mitzvah; an account of his trip to Poland on a cultural mission for the State Department; a section, "Poetry and the World," with essays such as "Poetry and Pleasure" and "The Responsibilities of the Poet" as well as brief pieces on Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen, Seamus Heaney, and Philip Larkin; a treatment of "American Poetry and American Life" composed of two parts, "Freneau, Whitman, and Williams" and "American Poetry and American Life." In his foreword he claims that these various elements all concern "the relation of poetry to its great, shadowy social context, the world." They are also linked by a common tone, a tone of relaxed, unpretentious conversation comprehensible to the common reader.

Pinsky's criticism is far removed from that of his deconstructionist academic colleagues. He proclaims his respect for literary tradition. He did a doctoral dissertation on W. S. Landor and has translated Horace. He has none of the urge to destroy the past which fired the avant-garde movements of this century. He writes: "We must feel ready to answer, as if asked by the dead if we have handed on what they gave us or asked by the unborn what we have for them. This is one answer, the great conservative answer, to the question of what responsibility the poet bears in society." It is clear why certain fellow critics regard Pinsky as "deliberately old fashioned." In "American Poetry and American Life" he extols P. Freneau and gives an extended analysis of "The Indian Burial Ground," although Freneau is usually dismissed as a versifier whose passionate devotion to Jeffersonsian democracy far outweighed his literary gifts. Whitman, of course, is praised for having successfully confronted "the gulf between ideals of liberty, art, democracy and the actual confusion, provinciality and economic struggles of American citizens and slaves." Pinsky observes that at the present time "the Whitmanian vision" has been most vividly expressed "by makers of movies and television and of American songs." He hails W. C. Williams for his success in relating American poetry to American life.

The second part of this section comments on Frank O'Hara, James Wright, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, and Anne Winters as practitioners of what Pinsky styles "formal heteroglossia," a procedure which is "a special American version of the old contest between established rhetoric on one side and the fresh growths of culture and personal experience on the other." Such critical passages may seem pedestrian, however, in comparison with the freshness and zest of boyhood memories of family and friends in Long Branch, with characters as picturesque as Pinsky's grandfather "with his big hands and his ape face," a successful bootlegger and a professional boxer; Izzy Ash, the owner of the town's largest junkyard, who gave him good counsel about graduate studies; and Norman Mailer's aunt, who ran a dress shop called "Estelle's."

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