SOURCE: "Figuring Multitudes," The Nation, Vol. 262, No. 17, April 29, 1996, pp. 25-8.

In the following favorable review of The Figured Wheel, Longenbach deems the collection "the most scrupulously intelligent body of work produced by an American poet in the past twenty-five years. "

Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry in the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did. I take this to be a good sign. But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic and translator than Robert Pinsky. The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems allows us to recognize the most scrupulously intelligent body of work produced by an American poet in the past twenty-five years.

Being the least dogmatic of poet-critics, Pinsky could never lend his name to an age. But in retrospect...