Galway Kinnell was born on February 1, 1927, in Providence, Rhode Island, the fourth child of James and Elizabeth Mills Kinnell, immigrants from Scotland and Ireland. Galway turned five the year the Kinnell family moved to nearby Pawtucket so that his carpenter father could continue to earn a living during the Great Depression. "How I came to practice poetry is a little bit of a mystery to me," says Kinnell in a recent interview, but he does remember that "I came to love poetry when I discovered, in a little anthology in my parents' bookshelf, the poems of Edgar Allan Poe in particular." Poe's language provided a counterpoint to the "rather unpoetical" accent of Rhode Island. "It's a very charming and loveable accent, but not very musical," Kinnell admits, and "to discover that this language could sing like that—'It was many and many a year ago in...