SOURCE: "Galway Kinnell Searches for Innocence," in Saturday Review, September/October 1983, pp. 14-16.

In the following essay, Beckman gives an overview of Kinnell's career in light of his having received the Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems.

When Galway Kinnell showed his early poem "First Song" to the poet William Carlos Williams in the late 1950s, Williams told the younger poet that he had no business writing poems about "cornstalk violins" because he had never played one, nor should he write about fields in Illinois, where he had never lived. Williams suggested that Kinnell, who was living on New York's Lower East Side, take a pad and pencil and jot down notes about the neighborhood where he lived and walked, and write poems about what he knew best.

Following Williams' advice, Kinnell absorbed his neighborhood, specifically Avenue C between 14th Street and Houston Street. What emerged was a long...