SOURCE: "Poetry, Criticism, and the World," in Poetry, Vol. CLVI, No. 5, August, 1990, pp. 297-308.

Breslin is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt from a review of Pinsky's Poetry and the World and J. D. McClatchy's White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry (1989), he describes the former as "essential," even though "it promises more 'world' than it delivers."

In Poetry and the World and White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry, two well-known poets present selections of their essays. Robert Pinsky has already written two prose books, one of which, The Situation of Poetry, has been widely and justly praised. (The other, a short study of Walter Savage Landor [Landor's Poetry], is less celebrated but well worth reading.) Poetry and the World, as its capacious title suggests, is less formal than its predecessors, ranging from critical essays through reflections on the "responsibilities of the poet" to autobiographical...