On Poetry, Culture, and Democracy

Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic. — Robert Lowell

For Robert Pinsky, poetry's individual, human scale as a fundamentally vocal medium, with poems brought to life by one person at a time, gives poetry a unique importance in American and democratic culture and society. This book brings together two compelling works of criticism by the former poet laureate: The Situation of Poetry and Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, in which he makes a passionate and eloquent case for the vital role of poetry in a democracy.