SOURCE: "'One and Zero Walk Off Together': Dualism in Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares," in American Poetry, Vol. 3, No. 1, Fall 1985, pp. 56-71.

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—is traced through The Book of Nightmares.

In The Book of Nightmares Galway Kinnell explores from a contemporary perspective one of the great themes of romantic poetry: What is the proper human response to death? For Kinnell the answer to that question is complicated by his being possessed of a deep spiritual longing while living in an existential world. And death, that ultimate existential fact, is the stumbling block to spiritual aspirations because it implies utter nullity. But even with life ending in the apparent finality of death, people often intuit a harmony beyond...