SOURCE: "American Poetry in American Life," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April, 1996, pp. 19-23.

In the essay below, Pinsky contemplates the social contexts of American poetry in contemporary America, tracing the development of its various manifestations and emphasizing the individual scale of its character.

What is the place of American poetry in American life?

Walt Whitman saw that the United States in its size and diversity, its relative freedom from aristocratic institutions and folk traditions, would need holding together. He thought it would be held together by poetry, by the American bard. He took that to be the meaning of American poetry: the machine created from words that would provide a form to hold us together, as other nations are held together by forms that hark back to old court cultures or to ancestral folk roots.

That has not been the case. You could make a...