April 21, 1980

Writing in the The New York Times Book Review, the influential Irish-American critic and teacher Denis Donoghue said of Pinsky’s collection of essays The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions (1978), “The mind at work…is lively, fresh, and critical without being obsessed by the rigor of criticism. [Pinsky’s] comments are brief, vivid, distinct… and his taste is excellent.”