Robert Pinsky Biography
(1940– ), Sadness and Happiness, An Explanation of America, History of My Heart, Landor's Poetry
American poet, born in New Jersey, educated at Rutgers and Stanford Universities, where he studied with Yvor Winters. Pinsky taught at Wellesley College, and later became Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His books of poems include Sadness and Happiness (1975), An Explanation of America (1979), and History of My Heart (1984). His critical writing includes a study of the British poet Walter Savage Landor, Landor's Poetry (1968), and a polemical study The Situation of Poetry (1977). He became poetry editor of the New Republic. Pinsky is a celebrant of the ordinary and the commonplace, whose deceptively simple poems acknowledge our desires for larger meanings beyond the insistent visibility of the ordinary world of daily reality.
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Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern FictionEncyclopedia of Literature: Ellis’ [Edith Mary Pargeter] ‘Peters Biography to Portrait of Dora (Portrait de Dora)