Galway Kinnell, who was recognized with both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for a body of poetry that pushed deep into the heart of human experience in the decades after World War II, died on Tuesday at his home in Sheffield, Vt. He was 87.
The cause was leukemia, his wife, Barbara K. Bristol, said.
Mr. Kinnell came of age among a generation of poets who were trying to get past the modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and write verses that, as he said, could be understood without a graduate degree. He succeeded well enough that all of the volumes of poems he published from 1960 to 2008 ”” evocations of urban streetscapes, pastoral odes, meditations on mortality and frank explorations of sex ”” are still in print.
Read it all.
Galway Kinnell, Plain-Spoken Poet, RIP
Galway Kinnell, who was recognized with both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for a body of poetry that pushed deep into the heart of human experience in the decades after World War II, died on Tuesday at his home in Sheffield, Vt. He was 87.
The cause was leukemia, his wife, Barbara K. Bristol, said.
Mr. Kinnell came of age among a generation of poets who were trying to get past the modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and write verses that, as he said, could be understood without a graduate degree. He succeeded well enough that all of the volumes of poems he published from 1960 to 2008 ”” evocations of urban streetscapes, pastoral odes, meditations on mortality and frank explorations of sex ”” are still in print.
Read it all.