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...