Galway Kinnell's first collection, What a Kingdom It Was (1960), can be viewed in retrospect now as one of those volumes signaling decisive changes in the mood and character of Amer-ican poetry as it departed from the witty, pseudo-mythic verse, apparently written to critical prescription, of the 1950's to arrive at the more authentic, liberated work of the 1960's. Our recent poetry shows how closely and vulnerably aware of the palpable life of contemporary society poets have become, for, increasingly during the past decade or so, they have opened themselves as persons to the complex, frequently incongruous, violence-ridden ethos of the age in an effort to ground the poetic imagination in a shared, perceptible reality. This kind of openness—a sensitive receptivity in which the poet, to borrow a phrase of Heidegger's about Hölderlin, "is exposed to the divine lightnings" that can easily exact their toll on nerves and emotional balance—extends, in many instances, beyond matters of social and political experience to naked metaphysical confrontation: with the universe, the identity of the self, the possibilities of an absent or present God, or the prospect of a vast, overwhelming nothingness. In such poets as Theodore Roethke, Kenneth Patchen, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, James Wright, Anne Sexton, James Dickey, W. S. Merwin, and Sylvia Plath, for example, with all differences aside, the pursuit of personal vision often leads toward a precipitous, dizzying boundary where the self stands alone, unaided but for its own resources, before the seemingly tangible earth at hand with its bewildering multiplicity of life, the remoteness of space, the endless rhythms of nature, the turns of night and day, and within, the elusive images of memory and dream, the irrationality and uncertainty of human behavior, the griefs and ecstasies that living accumulates. Here the poet—and Galway Kinnell is certainly of this company—is thrown back upon his own perceptions. His art must be the authoritative testimony to a man's own experience, or it is meaningless; its basic validity rests upon that premise.

"Perhaps to a degree more than is true of other poets, Kinnell's development will depend on the actual events of his life," James Dickey remarked prophetically in a review of What a Kingdom It Was [see CLC, Vol. 1]. For what we encounter as an essential ingredient in his work as it grows is not only the presence of the poet as man and speaker, but also his identification, through thematic recurrences, repeated images revelatory of his deepest concerns and most urgent feelings, with the experiences his poems dramatize…. Kinnell, using the considerable imaginative and linguistic powers at his command from the beginning, explores relentlessly the actualities of his existence to wrest from them what significance for life he can. Through the compelling force of his art, we find ourselves engaged in this arduous search with him. (pp. 134-35)