Saint Francis and the Sow Essay & Criticism

Saint Francis and the Sow Critical Overview

"Saint Francis and the Sow" is one of Galway Kinnell's most anthologized and often-read poems. For critic Howard Nelson, this poem stands "for the physical brilliance and weight in Kinnell's poetry," and the sow becomes, magically, "almost the earth herself." Hank Lazer also finds "Saint Francis and the Sow" a "remarkable poem," not only because it is "fit to join company with Kinnell's finest animal poems," but because it contains what Lazer considers to be at the heart of Kinnell's work, the "understanding that 'sometimes it is necessary / to reteach a thing its loveliness.'" We are to take the poem's method of blessing "in words and in touch" seriously, as the key to Kinnell's work, suggests Nancy Lewis Tuten, and look not to an inward-seeking spirituality for the pulse of his aesthetic, but to "the physical touch of another being." Liz Rosenberg's enthusiastic review of Selected Poems calls Kinnell...
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