Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry in the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did. I take this to be a good sign. But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic and translator than Robert Pinsky. The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems allows us to recognize the most scrupulously intelligent body of work produced by an American poet in the past twenty-five years.

Being the least dogmatic of poet-critics, Pinsky could never lend his name to an age. But in retrospect, it's difficult not to feel that the one-two punch of Sadness and Happiness (his first book of poems, published in 1975) and The Situation of Poetry (his account of American poetry after Modernism, published in 1977) had something to do with the swift decline of what we used to call the Age of Lowell—the age of high-wire, hard-drinking confessional poets. "But it is all bosh, the false / Link between genius and sickness," said Pinsky in "Essay on Psychiatrists," the long poem that concludes Sadness and Happiness: "The contemporary poets of lunacy—none of them / Helps me to think of the mad otherwise / Than in clichés."

With its provocative blandness, the very title of Pinsky's first book of poems announced his distance from the dramatically personal poetry of Sexton, Berryman or Plath. It was the style (more than the content) of poems like "Essay on Psychiatrists" that made the announcement meaningful. Rather than plumbing his soul in agitated free verse, Pinsky constructed an argument about the world in unruffled pentameters. In The Situation of Poetry, he helped to create the taste by which he was judged, offering the word "discursive" to describe a poetry that might be organized by abstract statement rather than primal images.

Almost overnight, the reception accorded these two books transformed a well-educated kid from Long Branch, New Jersey, into the new hope for American poetry. From the start of his career, however, Pinsky has worked to expand the possibilities available to American poetry—not to replace a narrow vision of poetry with one more sectarian view. The title poem of Sadness and Happiness, with its invitation to treat human emotions as abstract categories, turns out to be Pinsky's most movingly intimate performance: "Sadness and Happiness" is the name of a bedtime game he and his wife played with their daughters. Pinsky could have been describing himself when he recently said that the legitimately "post-modernist" poet will be one for whom "formal freedom feels assured, and matters of technique no longer fighting issues in the old modernist sense."

As far as Pinsky's own career is concerned, the most important aspect of Sadness and Happiness is the way in which its title poem suggests that emotions are both personal and public property. "Hate my whole kind, but me, / Love me for myself," thinks the Jewish soldier rescuing the anti-Semitic bully in "Poem About People." It can be difficult to separate the "unique soul" from its "kind," and Pinsky has struggled in all his poems to imagine a community that will give an individual meaning without threatening to dispense with individuality—a community we might exist in rather than be thoroughly of.

In An Explanation of America (1980), Pinsky undertook this task on a grand scale: Because of its imperialist hunger, American culture threatens to swallow us; but because of its vastness, the culture provides a sense of community amorphous enough to sustain us. Explanation is deeply intimate (it is addressed to Pinsky's daughter) and broadly discursive, an account of the world more supple and less arch than "Essay on Psychiatrists." But this style, however boldly extended, was never destined to be Pinsky's signature. In "The Figured Wheel," from History of My Heart (1984), Pinsky unveiled a poetry that, while retaining the clarity of his earlier work, moves with breathtaking rapidity, each phrase spilling out of the one before it. The "wheel" of the poem is a metaphor for historical process, the ever-evolving sense of community that both constitutes and dismantles the unique soul:

Pinsky has titled his collected poems The Figured Wheel because this poem announces his characteristic theme and inaugurates his fully mature style. Just as Pinsky himself is "figured" and "prefigured" in the forward-moving wheel of history, the theme is embodied in the restless, agglutinative movement of the poem.

In "Impossible to Tell," one of the most stunning new poems in The Figured Wheel, Pinsky describes the way in which medieval Japanese poets worked together to write linked poems, or renga: "The movement / Of linking renga coursing from moment to moment / Is meaning." This is a good description of what Pinsky tries to accomplish in his own poems, creating the texture not only of one poet's mind but of a community's accumulating stock of reality. At first, the poems might seem to move haphazardly, jumping from the sacred to the vulgar to the commonplace. Yet, as Pinsky suggests, the movement of the poem between these elements—more than the elements themselves—ultimately satisfies us. In "Impossible to Tell" Pinsky cuts back and forth between the Japanese poet Basho, nurturing his disciples, and Pinsky's friend Elliot Gilbert, a consummate teller of ethnic jokes. The jokes Pinsky repeats in "Impossible to Tell" are side-splitting, but the poem is also deeply moving. A kind of courtly community grows from the conventional yet idiosyncratic work of the joke-teller:

As these lines suggest, Pinsky often explores the racial and ethnic components of identity, and though all the ingredients for an identity politics are contained within his poems, such a politics never emerges. Rather than assert the singular importance of his lower-middle-class Jewish heritage, Pinsky instead emphasizes the mongrel, compromised heritage of everything: Communal activity fosters allegiance to "a state impossible to tell." Pinsky has on many occasions spoken of the wonderfully mixedup world of Long Branch, New Jersey (a tacky boardwalk resort populated by Jews, blacks and Italians that was also the summer residence of President Grant), and his poems seem like an effort to re-create his hometown's ambience in words. While the poems are not often about Long Branch, their linguistic texture feels like Long Branch: beautiful yet vulgar, poignant yet funny, preserved out of time yet, like the waves, relentlessly in motion.

But if Pinsky's poems are "cut shimmering from conventions of the dead," the shimmer is all Pinsky's. The poems often end in flights of lyrical fancy that do not transcend conventions but transfigure them in ways we would never have predicted. In "At Pleasure Bay," the final poem of The Want Bone (1990), a characteristically fragmented history of Long Branch segues into a sustained vision of the afterlife. After we die, we float across the river where a mass of bodies lie sleeping:

You lie down and embrace one body, the limbs
Heavy with sleep reach eagerly up around you
And you make love until your soul brims up
And burns free out of you and shifts and spills
Down over into that other body, and you
Forget the life you had and begin again
On the same crossing—maybe as a child who passes
Through the same place. But never the same way twice.
Here in the daylight, the catbird in the willows,
The new café, with a terrace and a landing,
Frogs in the cattails where the swing-bridge was—
Here's where you might have slipped across the water
When you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay.

Compared with these lines, some of the new poems in The Figured Wheel might at first seem dense and difficult. Still, these poems seem to be Pinsky's most focused body of work—the poems he has been writing toward for twenty-five years. In "The Ice-Storm" he rephrases the question he has been asking since "Poem About People": "What is life? A specimen, or a kind?" The answer, over and over again, is both. The notion of a community's atonement (or, more literally, its desire for at-one-ment) preoccupies him in "Avenue," which surveys a crowded city street, a cacophony of voices and images, before it becomes the point of view of one human specimen. This nameless "one"—a man lying drunk in the street—explains how he was rescued by the many:

Their headlights found me stoned, like a bundled sack
Lying in the Avenue, late. They didn't speak
My language. For them, a small adventure. They hefted
Me over the curb and bore me to an entry
Out of the way. Illuminated footwear
On both sides. How I stank. Dead drunk. They left me
Breathing in my bower between the Halloween
Brogans and pumps on crystal pedestals.

But I was dead to the world. The midnight city
In autumn. Day of attainment, tall saints
Who saved me. My taints, day of anointment.

"Avenue" suggests that, through anonymous acts of charity, a multitude might imagine a sense of community. But the drama of the poem is more resolutely linguistic than thematic. Poems like "The Figured Wheel" and "Impossible to Tell" move down the page phrase by phrase, twisting and turning, while in newer poems like "Avenue," "Ginza Samba" and "Desecration of the Gravestone of Rose P.," the syntactical units are shorter, and the poems move almost word by word. The language seems to generate itself (atonement, attainment, tall saints, taints, anointment), and consequently creates a threat of randomness in the poem's movement—as if the sound of the words alone were determining the direction of the poem's meaning. The poems never succumb to this threat. But we need to feel a swirling cloud of language congealing to make the poems, just as the crowd in "Avenue" seems as if it were condensed down to the nameless one in the street.

These poems are exciting to read. And however many times I re-read them, they remain mysterious. Not in the sense that they are obscure or merely difficult: The poems remind me of how the people we know best can, in an instant, become inscrutable. Among the new poems in The Figured Wheel, elegies are prominent; Pinsky commemorates the lives of lost friends, his mother, a grandmother he never knew. These poems tell us about other people, but even more profoundly, they let us feel the insoluble mystery of otherness. In "Poem With Refrains,' Pinsky looks at his mother so intently that he must wonder if he knew her at all. This woman—who refused to visit her own dying mother, although she lived four doors away—remains the "dark figure, awaited, attended, aware, apart."

Though threateningly intimate, "Poem With Refrains" is studded with quotations from other poems. And in a sense, all of Pinsky's poems are poems with refrains—poems that, while built from quotation and repetition, seem "to happen / Always for the first time over and over again." They make questions of language, culture and identity seem visceral. They suggest that we plumb the depths of our souls by surveying the grand diversity of names and roles we occupy throughout our lives. Pinsky is a poet who has also written criticism, translated Dante's Inferno and composed a hypertext novel. It isn't easy to explain why a culture needs poetry; but as we look forward to the next century, Pinsky offers a model for everything a poet could be.