Pinsky, Robert (1940-…), is a noted American poet, critic, and translator. He served as poet laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000.
Pinsky’s first volume of poetry, Sadness and Happiness (1975), is largely autobiographical. He dealt with themes from United States history in his long poem An Explanation of America (1979), comparing America to the Roman Empire. He continued his exploration of both personal and historical subjects in the collections History of My Heart (1984), The Want Bone (1990), Jersey Rain (2000), and Gulf Music (2007). The Figured Wheel: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1996 was published in 1996. Later collections include Selected Poems (2011) and At the Foundling Hospital (2016). Pinsky also wrote a prose novel, The Life of David (2005), based on the life of the Biblical king.
Pinsky’s highly praised critical works include The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions (1976) and Poetry and the World (1988). He was co-translator of poems by Polish American poet Czeslaw Milosz, published as The Separate Notebooks (1984). Pinsky also translated The Inferno of Dante (1994).
Robert Neal Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on Oct. 20, 1940. He received a B.A. degree from Rutgers The State University of New Jersey in 1962 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1966. He has taught at several colleges and universities, including Wellesley College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Boston University. He was also poetry editor for The New Republic magazine from 1978 to 1986.
As poet laureate, Pinsky developed the Favorite Poem Project, which created an audio and video archive of Americans speaking aloud poems they love. The project, Pinsky said, was intended to provide a “snapshot of the American people, through the lens of poetry, at the turn of the millennium.”
