SOURCE: "Robert Pinsky and the Language of Our Time," in Salmagundi, No. 103, Summer, 1994, pp. 157-77.

In the essay below, Longenbach traces Pinsky's artistic development in terms of the poet's "deep awareness—sometimes wariness, sometimes worship"—of historical, linguistic, and literary forces at work in his art.

Robert Pinsky has always stood apart from the various schisms used to map the world of American poetry. He not only admires both the formal terseness of Cunningham and the capacious waywardness of O'Hara; his poems also seem to partake of both these qualities. Formal and free, open and closed, Olson and Wilbur—however the twentieth-century American poetry is divided, Pinsky remains unplaceable in the best sense of the word. He has recently said that Seamus Heaney seems legitimately "post-modernist" because in his work, "formal freedom feels assumed, and matters of technique no longer fighting issues in the old modernist sense." This...