Galway Kinnell Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Charles Molesworth

Critical Essay by Charles Molesworth

SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems, in Commonweal, Vol. 110, No. 5, p. 157.

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."

… In Galway Kinnell's Selected Poems thirty-five years of poetry definitely originates in a single, identifiable sensibility. From the largely ironic and structured First Poems, on through the ecstatic longing for transcendence in Body Rags (1968) and The Book of Nightmares (1971), Kinnell's career develops as a paradigm of one of the major shifts in postwar poetry. This shift affected the work of many poets directly, such as Robert Bly and James Wright, but it also indirectly altered the major idiom of American poetry, moving as it did toward a language of empathy and celebration. Drawing on various sources such as Rilke, Whitman, Lawrence, and Frost, Kinnell's poetry gained prominence...
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