Not the least remarkable thing about Robert Pinsky's remarkable [An Explanation of America] is that it seems to defy not only all the dominant trends in contemporary poetry but all the dominant notions—both American and non-American—of what is to be expected of an American poet. The very title looks and sounds like a provocative anachronism, reminiscent as it is of Pope's An Essay on Man. As for "explanation," the long-established dogma is that poetry does not and must not explain anything, that its business is to enact, to show—"no ideas but in things"—to move, in more than one sense of the word, "not to mean but be"; and wherever twentieth-century American poetry serves as a model to non-Americans, as it does in many parts of the world, what is imitated or emulated is its vitalism, its immediacy, its instantaneousness….

[Robert Pinsky] is well aware...