Galway Kinnell Summary

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1948 and an M.A. from the University of Rochester in 1949. Kinnell served in the U.S. Navy in 1945... Read more

In the following excerpt, Kinnell 's first book of verse is commended for its direct, colloquial language unfettered by contemporary influences. Galway Kinnell's … first book of p... Read more

In the following essay, HUdgins notes that a dualistic stance toward death—both the rational perception of our own extinction as well as our mystical union with the universe after death—... Read more

In the following excerpt, Beaver praises The Past for its moments of "absorbed attention, " Kinnell 's ability to affix the present into the past and vice versa [In his work], Gal... Read more

In the following essay, Taylor traces Kinnell's "poetic evolution, " from a Christian theology to a sacramentalism that elevates "numinous moments,". To read the poe... Read more

Calhoun's explication of the poems in When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone follows in this excerpt. In Galway Kinnell's tenth major book of poetry, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, ... Read more

In the following essay, Kinnell's career is surveyed in light of the publication of Imperfect Thirst. In this last decade of an apocalyptic century, many of us begin to search for the voices wh... Read more

In the following excerpt, Benedikt notes a radical shift in Kinnell's work that moves from a preoccupation with urban life toward that which was to become a hallmark of the poet's verse,... Read more

In the following essay, mythology as well as Kinnell's own comments on the poem's structure aid Hilberry in analyzing The Book of Nightmares. Writing about Galway Kinnell's long p... Read more

In the following excerpt, Bell relates his intimate knowledge of his former student's career, up to and including The Book of Nightmares. In the winter of 1946-47, when I was teaching at Prince... Read more

In the following excerpt, Molesworth hails Selected Poems, a thirty-five-year retrospective of Kinnell's career, as a "paradigm of one of the major shifts in postwar poetry." ... Read more

Critical Essay by John Hobbs In Galway Kinnell's poem "The Bear," a hunter stalks the bear to its death, falls asleep exhausted, dreams he becomes the bear, and then awakens someh... Read more

Critical Essay by Jerome Mcgann In [Galway Kinnell] we see that the idea of paradise gets reborn in the cultivation of waste places. (pp. 161-62) Life is found in death, fountains in deserts, gain in ... Read more

Critical Essay by Alan Helms With The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World and The Book of Nightmares we have a clear view of Galway Kinnell's work from the beginning to the ... Read more

Critical Essay by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Galway Kinnell's first collection, What a Kingdom It Was (1960), can be viewed in retrospect now as one of those volumes signaling decisive changes in the ... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Tillinghast Trying to define for myself the particular excellence of Galway Kinnell's poetry, I thought of something Robert Lowell once wrote about Allen Tate, in many... Read more

Critical Essay by Susan B. Weston In the recently published Walking Down the Stairs, selections from interviews with Galway Kinnell …, one of the interviewers asks Kinnell: "That lonelin... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Stitt Galway Kinnell once said, according to Donald Hall, that he had no use for any poem upon which the poet did not bring to bear the weight of his entire life. The results o... Read more

Critical Essay by Stephen Yenser In an interview in 1971, [Galway Kinnell] had this to say about The Book of Nightmares, the superb long poem published earlier that year: I thought of that poem as on... Read more

Critical Essay by Joe Marusiak One problem with [defining poetry] is ourselves: we keep getting in the way, obstructing the viewfinder with all these stray edges of selves. We cannot read without putt... Read more