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Introduction
The Voice of the Poet
“One of the most powerful and moving poets of his generation” (Keane 77), a poet writing “[i]n the direct line of Whitman, [and] the indirect line of Eliot” (Ricks 75), “a major mythic poet” (A. Taylor 44), a poet standing “directly in the line of American poet-seers from Emerson and Whitman to Roethke and Ammons” (Parini 105), “one of Villon’s best translators” (Rosenthal 472), “a kind of evangelist of the physical world” (H. Nelson, “Introduction” 2), “a visionary who is also perfectly capable of laughing at himself” (Young 140), and “our mightiest poet of transcendence” (Rosenberg 118). The list of critical acknowledgments paid to Galway Kinnell over the years is long, maybe even too long and forceful for a poet whose prime ambition has always been to become “simply the voice of a creature on earth speaking” (Kinnell, “PPD” 264). Yet, unremittingly, critics have commended Galway Kinnell’s work, often by pairing his name with such famous predecessors as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke.