Saint Francis and the Sow | Critical Overview
“Saint Francis and the Sow” is one of Galway Kinnell’s most anthologized and often-read poems. For critic Howard Nelson, this poem stands “for the physical brilliance and weight in Kinnell’s poetry,” and the sow becomes, magically, “almost the earth herself.” Hank Lazer also finds “Saint Francis and the Sow” a “remarkable poem,” not only because it is “fit to join company with Kinnell’s finest animal poems,” but because it contains what Lazer considers to be at the heart of Kinnell’s work, the “understanding that ‘sometimes it is necessary / to reteach...
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