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 ways Kinnell's opposite. Tate's poetry was, Lowell said, "burly" and written in a style that "would take a man's full weight and that would bear his complete intelligence, passion, and subtlety." Kinnell's poetry has that impressive, "burly" masculinity. He has done that most difficult thing for a writer—he has achieved a style that does not restrict his range but rather a lows him to write on all sorts of subjects and to speak in many moods and tones of voice.

Kinnell's Selected Poems is the year's most important book of poetry, rivaled only by Charles Wright's Country Music (Selected Early Poems). There are very few living poets (James Merrill comes to mind) capable of lines whose music can compare to the great...