"Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic."--Robert Lowell Two important books of criticism by the Pulitzer Prize finalist and former U.S. poet laureate--now combined in a single volume with a new preface by the author This book brings together two compelling works of criticism by Robert Pinsky--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. 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, neglected importance in American and democratic culture and society.