Pastan won the Dylan Thomas Poetry Award sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine in 1954, and the runner up was Sylvia Plath. Pastan got married after graduation and attended grad school while starting a family with her husband, who was in medical school. By her own admission, something had to go, and that something turned out to be the practice of poetry. She did not begin writing poems again for ten years.

In that ten-year period, runner-up Plath would write the autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), and became a vanguard of confessional poetry, alongside other American poets, including Anne Sexton. The poetry of Plath and Sexton, often also categorized as Postmodern, centered on individual, and often traumatic, experience. Pastan, when she returned to poetry, took a very different approach, focusing on the life around her and its daily events. Her many collections consider subject matter close to home—family, children, illness, aging, and death are common threads.

Pastan has resisted criticism that she says lauds the male poet for his treatment of the ordinary, while diminishing poems by women who concern themselves with the same subjects. Contemporary poets who write on similar themes to Pastan include Jane Kenyon, who drew tremendous inspiration from everyday elements such as the family dog and the garden.