Galway Kinnell

About this book

In this original study of the life and works of the American poet Galway Kinnell, Richard J. Calhoun offers a fresh, comprehensive look at this award-winning writer, who has so often been misunderstood by critics. Neither a leader of a movement nor a follower, Kinnell has received relatively little representation in standard poetry anthologies, despite his importance in modern verse. He has nevertheless attracted a devoted readership and an increasing amount of critical attention, winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983, and sharing an American Book Award in the same year. This critical study seeks to convey the full range of Kinnell's achievement. Kinnell has produced abundantly in the course of a career that has spanned more than thirty years, publishing eight major volumes of poetry, a novel, assorted critical essays and commentary on his own works in the form of "self-interviews" and an acclaimed translation of the verse of Francois Villon. In this study, Calhoun places Kinnell in the tradition of the postmodern, personal poets like Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell, and demonstrates the wide variety of models Kinnell has followed, from Whitman to Rainer Maria Rilke. In doing so, Calhoun challenges those critics who have perceived Kinnell as a poet undeviatingly concerned with mortality, and provides a fresh, nuanced interpretation of Kinnell's work, one that does not try to force the variegated work of this accomplished poet into preconceived categories. Considering in turn Kinnell's life, milieu, works, and influence, Calhoun concludes that the poet has attempted to imaginatively identify with all living creatures of the natural world, to understand the morality required of conscious, living creatures in the face of their mortality.