SOURCE: "Galway Kinnell: Moments of Transcendence," in The Princeton Library Chronicle, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1963, pp. 56-70.

In the following essay, a brief biography of Kinnell followed by an appraisal of his early work is presented.

Galway Kinnell was born in 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Pawtucket. He came to Princeton in the summer of 1944 and after only one semester joined the Navy. Six months later he returned to Princeton in the V-12 program and graduated at midyears in 1948. He then took an M.A. at the University of Rochester. His life since then has followed an alternating pattern common among American poets of his generation: teaching and travel, academic appointments and foreign fellowships. For two years he taught at Alfred University, and for three more he was Director of the Liberal Arts Programs at University College in the University of Chicago. Then in 1955 a Fulbright Fellowship took...