SOURCE: "The Poetic Milieu of Galway Kinnell: From Modernism to Postmodernism and Neoromanticism," in Galway Kinnell, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 8-16.

In the following essay, Calhoun places Kinnell is placed among his predecessors and contemporaries as well as his poetic influences.

Born in 1927, Galway Kinnell was one of a generation of American poets who were trying to establish themselves as published poets at a time when the modernist practice in poetry and the formalist New Criticism theory, in vogue during their college years, had come under attack. It is important to see his poetry in the context of the transition that was taking place when he began writing from modernism to postmodernism. Four decisive events that signified change in the 1950s were the appearance of Charles Olson's antiformalist Projective Verse manifesto in 1950; the publication of Philip Larkin's personal poetry in Poems in England in 1954; the sensationalism of...