[In the following excerpt, Corn deems Pinsky's poetry "accurate, truthful, conscientious" and compares his work to that of Walt Whitman.]

We can doubt that the book [An Explanation of America] does … in fact, explain America, but not that it defends the humane values of reason and communitarianism. It is not Pinsky's first such defense. Critic and poet, he is the author, first, of Lander's Poetry (1968), a book remarkable for the sensitivity, discrimination, and enthusiasm of its readings. It is also sometimes rash, as when Pinsky compares Landor's "To My Child Carlino" to Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode, with all the disadvantage on the side of Wordsworth. The same kind of rashness runs through The Situation of Poetry (1975), Pinsky's survey of recent American poetry, with special reference to "Ode to a Nightingale." The book argues interestingly but unconvincingly in favor of the "discursive" as a central poetic mode, and the one most able to bear moral content. Within this polemical framework, Pinsky makes many aberrant judgments, rating some poets too high, others—John Ashbery in particular—too low; and his treatment of Harold Bloom's views exceeds, in tone and manner, what could be considered a legitimate expression of difference in critical opinion. In 1976 Pinsky published a book of poems, Sadness and Happiness, which received high praise, and merited it. The title poem is one of the best written in the 1970s; and the overall convincingness of the book assures it of a readership for a long time to come.

It is possibly Randall Jarrell who provided Pinsky with a clue to the subject matter he has treated so tellingly in his poetry, the aspirations and disappointments of Americans "just like ourselves": dwellers in the suburbs, frequenters of shopping malls, zoos, Pancake Houses; parents of fledgling pianists and horsewomen, standers in line at the Savings and Loan. There is a sweetness and pathos to all this—the Cheever and Updike fictional turf—which has never been captured so well before in poetry. The effect would be marred if Pinsky had allowed himself to lapse into easy satire or sentimentality, or inaccuracy. His observations, like his style, have an irrefutable air of honesty about them; so impressive is the technical feat I'm tempted to apply to it something Yvor Winters said (overstating a little) about Edwin Arlington Robinson's poetry: "it is accurate with the conscientiousness of genius."

Accurate, truthful, conscientious: these are the terms that describe Pinsky's poetry. Still, it must be said that An Explanation of America is a strange and irrational book in many of its aspects. (I'm speaking of the long title poem, not the fine short lyric "Lair," which opens the volume, nor the affecting "Memorial," which closes it.) This long poem is strange both in its ambitious scope and in the organization of its materials. It has three parts, titled "Its Many Fragments," "Its Great Emptiness," and "Its Everlasting Possibility," each of these in turn divided into four subtitled sections. The metric frame throughout is rough iambic pentameter, with paragraphing rather than fixed strophic breaks. The second part of the poem includes a translation of Horace's Epistula I, xvi, and a discussion of his life and thought. Pinsky's poem is itself like an epistle, for he has subtitled it "A Poem to My Daughter," (the "you" of the poem), and means it in some sense to be addressed to her.

I don't mean merely to pretend to write
To you, yet don't mean either to pretend
To say only what you might want to hear.
I mean to write my idea of you,
And not expecting you to read a word …

Every long poem needs a Beatrice, in this case the poet's daughter. The fiction is useful here, allowing Pinsky to develop a colloquial or epistolary tone that holds the reader; I have read the poem many times, and always straight through, without stopping (this despite the obstacle of the unvaried pentameter frame). The fact that the poet's interlocutor is a child and not an adult—his wife, for example, whose entire absence from the poem is never explained—helps support the general tone of simplicity, fairness, and tact. Communing with ourselves, or addressing another adult at length, we can't plausibly avoid defensiveness of one sort or another—wisecracks, assertiveness, false modesty, even ill humor. When children are listening, we have to do better, and, given Pinsky's commitment to moral perspectives, he could hardly have found a better strategy.

The poem's narrator is present only as a voice and an observing eye, never as an actor; and this, too, helps keep intact our confidence in his moral authority. Most people can see and say what the right thing is, but few can plausibly present themselves as doing it; or if they portray themselves as having erred, avoid the impression of self-hatred or self-pity. None of the poet's actions, not even his profession, is given in the text, and the inevitable complications are circumvented. Actually, the poet does, I believe, appear briefly in the poem's third part, a scene where a father (presented in the third person) watches his daughter's riding lesson. It is likely that this character is really the poet, for the narrator (and reader) are let inside his thoughts. It is the only such instance in the poem, though, and even here the character is presented primarily as an observer.

I raise these issues about the structure and intent of the poem to emphasize the difficulty of the problems Pinsky has had to contend with. He has risen to the challenge. Among the many reasons to admire this book is its legitimate ambitiousness; and I don't think it should be received as just one more collection of poems, some good, some bad. "A country is the things it wants to see," we are told in the opening part of the poem. Like Elizabeth Bishop, he has a keen eye; and he can present what he sees, and, what's more, think consequentially about it. At the mere level of perception, it has already a vigorous, affecting clarity:

Thus he begins the characterization of his daughter, one of the most winsome in any recent poem. Before it is ended, you half wish she were your own daughter. "A country is the things it wants to see," Pinsky says, and lists some of the things she will become accustomed to, growing up as an American: all kinds of ball games, advertisements, Disney cartoons, Deep Throat, car crashes, Brownies (the Scouts, that is), collies, Colonial Diners, cute greeting cards, and "hippie restaurants." To be a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles on this scale is to have supreme confidence in the transforming power of lines in pentameter. Part of the fascination here is the nagging question of whether he has actually "gotten away with it." I think he has, partly because of the strange power of the "always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life," as Bishop once characterized it, and partly because of his use of incantatory, lulling repetitions of phrases and lines—a technique he may have borrowed from Bishop. As he moves through his topics, "Local Politics," "Countries and Explanations," his allusions as far-flung as Winston Churchill, Gogol, and Mayor Daley, one feels not so much instructed as chanted to, over a slowly, endlessly rocking cradle.

The most interesting part of the poem, conceptually and aesthetically, is the second, "Its Great Emptiness." The opening section, "A Love of Death," calls upon the reader to imagine a scene on the great Western plains (time unspecified), where a little girl is witnessing a communal grain harvest. As details are filled in, the imperative "imagine" is reiterated (some dozen times)—a device with precedents no less august than Canto XIII of the Paradiso and Bishop's "Little Exercise." These imaginings build up a powerful scene; the prairie takes on an hallucinatory solidity and presence, despite its having been carefully presented as fictive. Then, an untoward event: a half-crazed tramp climbs up on one of the threshing machines and throws himself into it; is killed. (I was reminded fleetingly of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony.") After this senseless occurrence, the scene dissolves, and the poem begins a meditation on the nature of the forces that might account for the atrocity, and others like it, on a philosophical or visionary level:

The obliterating strangeness and the spaces
Are as hard to imagine as the love of death …
Which is the love of an entire strangeness,
The contagious blankness of a quiet plain.
Imagine that a man, who had seen a prairie,
Should write a poem about a Dark or Shadow
That seemed to be both his, and the prairie's—as if
The shadow proved that he was not a man,
But something that lived in the quiet, like the grass.
Imagine that the man who writes that poem,
Stunned by the loneliness of that wide pelt,
Should prove to himself that he was like a shadow
Or like an animal living in the dark.

A possible antidote to these morbid imaginings of emptiness, dark, and death might, Pinsky proposes, be found in the consciousness of "immigrants and nomads":

Another salutary outlook proposed is the traditional Horatian "equal mind"—and a sense of the positive value of death. Pinsky inserts into the poem Horace's Epistle to Quinctius, in which the genius of the Sabine Hills discusses their divergent modes of life and their chances for keeping dignity and uprightness. Horace observes that the man who is not afraid to die is safe from tyrants and an unworthy life—suicide is his warrant. The position may strike us as drastic, but it is true to the spirit of Stoicism and can name any number of precedents in Roman history. Pinsky's translation reads fluently and colloquially; he joins here the distinguished company of English translators of Horace, notably Sidney, Dryden, and Pope. [the author adds in a footnote: For whatever reason the apologist of the Aurea mediocritas has never attracted many Americans, excepting writers like Franklin P. Adams, Louis Untermeyer, and Eugene Field—though I think I remember a version of the Carpe diem ode by Robinson, and a sonnet-length "imitation" in Lowell's History.]

The last part of An Explanation of America is its strangest. Here Pinsky takes up the issue of "everlasting possibility," that American theme, and juxtaposes it to a sense of limit and boundary. With only a tenuous sense of transition, he moves to an examination of evil, in its characteristic American form of violence. Random assault (with sexual connotations) and Vietnam are invoked. Pinsky views the Southeast Asia debacle as unprecedented, some sort of turning point in the national consciousness, a first loss of innocence. (But surely an earlier example is the 1860-1865 disaster, which still continues to deliver grievous consequences—reread Patriotic Gore.) If Pinsky fails to explain American violence, he can hardly be blamed; it is one of the country's ugly, unaccountable mysteries.

The poem comes to a close (three years after its author began it, we are told) with an engaging description of the young daughter performing the role of Mamilius in The Winter's Tale, suitably dignified in hose and tunic. This affectionate tableau of Romance is balanced, on the poet's side, by a fanciful panorama of an imagined mountaintop city; it is to be understood, I think, as a metaphoric portrait of America.

America having been summed up as "a pastoral / Delusion of the dirt and rocks and trees, / Or daydream of Leviathan himself, / A Romance of implausible rebirths," the poem ends its long survey with a last glance at "our whole country, / So large, and strangely broken, and unforeseen." My own survey of the poem doesn't do justice to its intricacy and richness, the artful weaving of theme and metaphor that makes for its dense, evocative texture. It is a poem in which intellect and reason play a large role; the attendant risks cannot be unfamiliar to the critic of Landor, whose poem "To Barry Cornwall" reminds us:

Reason is stout, but ever reason
May walk too long in Rhyme's hot season:
I have heard many folks aver
They have caught horrid cold with her.

Still, to have more than usual intellect is a fate like any other; if among the many mansions in the house of poetry there is none to shelter that fate, then poetry is not as inclusive as we believe—or need it to be. Myself, I consider An Explanation of America an important addition to American letters, even if it goes against the grain in some ways.

I should mention as well one or two dislikes, since the poem shows every sign of being able to weather them. The title: wouldn't "Reflections on America" have been (though no more appetizing) more exact? Poets can sometimes explain the universe (which is ahistorical and nonspatial), but a country so large and various as ours is beyond their scope. The effort to contain and account for all our American experience is felt in this poem as effort; it could only be partially successful. Then, the contents: although the Epistle makes nice reading, bringing it and Horace's life into the poem strikes me as misjudged. The insights developed from them could have been presented in another fashion, one more consistent with the general plan and texture of the poem. And for obvious reasons, the biographical summary of Horace's life following the translation is filled with flat, prosy lines: "Time passed; the father died; the property / And business were lost, or confiscated." "Horace came back to Rome a pardoned rebel / In his late twenties, without cash or prospects…." "I think that what the poet meant was this," (repeated later as, "I think that what the poet meant may be / Something like that"). These would be dull sentences even in a piece of prose.

No reader is likely to agree with all the opinions expressed or implied in the poem, of course. Pinsky is entitled to them; but I will mention one of his views that struck me as egregious. He describes an occasion when, during a flash flood on Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway, "Black youths" appeared and "pillaged the stranded motorists like beached whales." He says, "a weight of lead / Sealed in their hearts was lighter for some minutes, / Amid the riot." This imaginative leap into the state of mind of the assailants may well be accurate; but why wasn't the same leap made in behalf of the victims in this case? The implied approval of the incident is unfortunate; this sort of spontaneism has never had the support of effective civil rights leaders, and is viewed by them as at most a futile reaction to present oppressive conditions.

Another surprising detail in the poem is Pinsky's misapprehension or simply abuse of some of Whitman's most ringing lines from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." After describing teenage prostitution in New York City, Pinsky continues:

This is a willful misuse of Whitman—a poet who, faced with a young prostitute and her "blackguard oaths," wrote, in Song of Myself, "Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you."

The misuse is the more striking in that Pinsky himself owes quite a lot to Whitman—An Explanation of America is the most recent extension of that tradition, and one of the best. Pinsky is less sanguine than Whitman, of course; for more than a hundred years we have heard the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of faith in the American Dream. But he shows, nevertheless, a reassuring agility of spirit and generosity of affections, inside and outside the domestic round. His discriminations and caveats deserve a careful hearing—the author of Sadness and Happiness and An Explanation of America is a very distinguished newcomer among the unruly tribe of our poets.