Robert Pinsky was born on Oct. 20, 1940, in Long Branch, N.J. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of the declining seashore resort town. His grandfather was a prizefighter, tavern owner, and bootlegger, though his father chose a more conservative career as an optician. Robert had an early sensitivity to poetry, finding appealing rhythms in the calls of local train conductors and other sounds of his daily life.

After graduating from Long Branch High School, Pinsky attended Rutgers College in his home state, where his love of poetry became more clearly defined. He wrote out William Butler Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium and taped it to a wall of his dorm room, and T.S. Eliot was the subject of his senior thesis. He graduated from Rutgers in 1962 and went to Stanford University on a creative writing fellowship.

At Stanford, Pinsky showed some of his poems to professor and poet Yvor Winters, who told him “you simply don't know how to write.” Pinsky decided it was time to learn and adopted Winters as his mentor. He published his first poems in the October 1965 issue of Southern Review.

Ten years later, Pinsky's first book of poetry, Sadness and Happiness, was published. Its title poem was based on a bedtime game he and his wife, Ellen, played with their three daughters. Sadness and Happiness was followed by An Explanation of America (1980) and History of My Heart (1984), which won the William Carlos Williams Prize of the Poetry Society of America. From 1979 to 1986 Pinsky was the poetry editor of The New Republic. He taught English at the University of California at Berkeley and at Wellesley College before joining the graduate writing faculty of Boston University in 1989.

Pinsky's poems were marked by his unique ability to tie the holy, the vulgar, and the commonplace together. Rather than spilling out images of emotional ecstasies, he often wrote in abstract statements, bringing a sense of history into the present and connecting the individual to the community. Pinsky wrote in a New York Times column that poetry was not only a private experience but also a “part of the marketplace where we all gather.” He wrote his poems very quickly and in any situation in which ideas came to him.

Poetry was not Pinsky's only realm of achievement, however. His 1994 verse translation of Dante's Inferno earned him critical acclaim and made the best-seller list in many cities. He won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the translation and the Harold Morton Landon Translation award given by the Academy of American Poets. He also co-translated The Separate Notebooks, a book of poems by Czes?aw Mi?osz, and wrote several books of prose, including The Situation of Poetry (1977) and Poetry and the World (1988).

Rather than viewing literature and technology as opposing forces, Pinsky claimed that “poetry is part of our shared, communal life, as surely as is the Internet.” He drew connections between poetry and computers, claiming that poems were the human body's technology for committing things to memory with speed. In 1984 he wrote an interactive “text adventure” based on the Inferno, and he later served as the poetry editor of a weekly Internet magazine, Slate.

Pinsky's other poetry volumes included The Want Bone (1990), The Figured Wheel (1996), and Jersey Rain (2000). He won the Shelley Memorial award from the Poetry Society of America in April 1995, as well as fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.

In the spring of 1997, Pinsky was named poet laureate of the United States, a two-year position in which the recipient acts as a consultant and ambassador for poetry to the nation. Poet laureate seemed a fitting honor for Pinsky, who brought a distinctly American perspective to his poems. He played the saxophone and was an enthusiastic baseball fan, following the Boston Red Sox and the Brooklyn Dodgers. One of Pinsky's first ideas after being named poet laureate was to ask people from all over the country—average citizens as well as celebrities—to read and record their favorite poems, which would then be collected and maintained as a kind of national archive.