SOURCE: "Kinnell, Galway," in Contemporary Poets, 3rd Ed., New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980, pp. 835-37.

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 Princeton University, a dark-shocked student, looking more like a prize fighter than a literary man, showed me a poem, maybe his first. I remember it as a Wordsworthian sonnet, not what the avant-garde of Princeton, Blackmur or Berryman, would have taken to—old diction, no modern flair. But the last couplet had a romantic fierceness that amazed me. The man who had done that could go beyond any poetic limits to be assigned. I was reckless enough to tell him so.

I was to lecture at Black Mountain that summer. He took a bit of his G.I. money and came...