Saint Francis and the Sow (Author Biography)

Author Biography

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 a kingdom by the sea ’ — thrilled me.” Kinnell describes his childhood as “particularly lonely,” and his personality, “shy to the point of mutinous.” By age twelve he knew he wanted to write poems himself, because it was the only way he had of saying the things he “couldn’t express in ordinary life.” Poetry was the key to “that inner life,” he says, whose “weight of meaning and feeling has to get out.”

As Kinnell became more serious about writing poetry, encouraging influences came his way — an English teacher at Wilbraham Academy, and at Princeton, his roommate, the poet W. S. Merwin. But most important was a teacher, Charles G. Bell, who astutely recognized Kinnell’s gift at “first sight.” Bell remembers in a memoir that

“In the winter of 1946-47, when I was teaching at Princeton University, a dark-shocked student, looking more like a prize fighter than a literary man, showed me a poem, maybe his first. I remember it as a Wordsworthian sonnet, not what the avant-garde of Princeton, Blackmur or Berryman, would have taken to — old diction, no modern flair. But the last couplet had a romantic fierceness that amazed me. The man who had done that could go beyond any poetic limits to be assigned. I was reckless enough to tell him so.”

Kinnell gives Charles Bell credit for mentoring his work through its youthful use of traditional forms into a distinctive voice that seemed to flower “from within” and come to full expression in free verse. And even as a mature poet, Kinnell continued to turn to Bell for trustworthy critiques of his work. Bell proclaims Kinnell “of all the poets born in the twenties and thirties the only one who has taken up the passionate symbolic search of the great American tradition,” and describes the poet with words such as “passionate,” “volcanic,” “lyrical,” “transparent,” “intuitive,” and “death-haunted.”

Hardly a better set of adjectives is available for Kinnell since his entry into American poetry in 1960 with What a Kingdom It Was. This volume and its famous long poem “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” reflects Kinnell’s gypsy-like decade after graduating summa cum laude from Princeton in 1948. Having earned an M.A. in English from the University of Rochester, he then spent time at the University of Chicago, the University of Grenoble (France), in New York City, at Juniata College (Huntington, Pennsylvania), Colorado State University, Reed College (Portland, Oregon), University of California at Irvine, the University of Iowa, and in Iran as a Fulbright lecturer. In 1961, Kinnell bought an abandoned farm in rural Sheffield, Vermont, and before 1968 had published two more volumes of poetry and translations of the French poets François Villon and Yves Bonnefoy.

During the sixties, Kinnell became a social and political activist. He was jailed briefly for his work on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana, and protested along with other American poets against the Vietnam War in numerous readings. Poems such as “The Last River” and “Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond” articulate Kinnell’s passionate engagement in these national crises. In 1965, Kinnell married Inés Delgado de Torres, and two children, Maud and Fergus, soon followed. The children inspired several of Kinnell’s well-known poems, such as “Under the Maud Moon,” in which he remembers Maud’s birth and the “agonized clenches making / the last molds of her life in the dark.” With its eulogistic litany, “Fergus Falling” opens Mortal Acts, Mortal Words(1980) by paying homage to a pond “from which many have gone” and which his son Fergus “saw for the first time” just before a dangerous fall from a tree.

For the next twenty years, Kinnell’s growing renown as a poet, reader, and teacher took him to posts in Spain, France, Australia, Hawaii, and eventually to New York City in 1985, where he still holds the post of Samuel F. B. Morse Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. Honors and prizes have followed nearly every volume, even when his work moved in new directions after the publication in 1971 of the critically acclaimed Book of Nightmares. This long meditation on death in a ten-part sequence muses finally whether it should be called a poem, or a “concert of one / divided among himself, / this earthward gesture / of the sky-diver.” Despite his transition after that volume to more affirmative poems and shorter lyrics, Galway Kinnell continues to be preoccupied with the “poetics of the physical world,” (after an essay by that name), in books such as Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980), The Past (1985), When One Has Lived a Long Time(1990), and most recently, Imperfect Thirst (1994). For forty years, Galway Kinnell has written and read poems which, to use his own words, “cling to the imperfect music of a human voice.”