Robert Pinsky’s headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer’s view of specific works: William Carlos Williams’s “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets.
This anthology respects poetry’s mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.
Robert Pinsky is the award-winning author of over twenty volumes of poetry. He served as United States poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, during which time he founded the Favorite Poem Project. He teaches at Boston University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.