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.

I was to lecture at Black Mountain that summer. He took a bit of his G.I. money and came along. Apart from some works of mine which seemed to move him, it was to Yeats that he gave himself with the totality that has always characterized him. By the fall he had written the first form of a four-page poem, "A Morning Wake among the Dead" (later called "Among the Tombs"), which foreshadowed in volcanic latency all his later long poems. The deathhaunted, tragic Kinnell had already spoken, though it would take years for the fact to be recognized.

In form, Kinnell was still using a romantic and Miltonic pentameter almost totally remade under impacts from Donne and the moderns—meter purposely broken up, rhymes concealed—a demonic wrestling with traditional measures. His matter was the reaffirmation of the Promethean and pioneer daring of America, to which I also, after the neo-Augustinian resignations of the war, was committed. He wrote a whole volume of Western poems which did not find a publisher, though some of them, revised, appear in the first sections of What a Kingdom It Was.

About 1956 Kinnell was able to get abroad. It was not too late for his "Prairie" style to be infused with French modernism, though without losing its passionate immediacy. The most remarkable fruit of this is "The Supper after the Last," in What a Kingdom, a symbolist vision and statement, at one time Promethean-romantic and mysteriously avant-garde.

Kinnell's break with traditional form has continued, leading to his espousal of free verse as the only possible medium for an American poet. It is significantly to Whitman that he has returned, with some inspiration from William Carlos Williams. But anyone who will take the twisted rhymes of the earlier Kinnell and set them beside the free verse of recent works—that staggering diptych of animal poems, "The Porcupine" and "The Bear" in Body Rags—will sense how far everything that has occurred, both in content and form, was within the province of the original Apocalyptic vision of "A Morning Wake among the Dead."

What distinguishes that vision from anything else on the contemporary scene is its continuation of the titanism of the last century—whatever flamed from Goethe's Faust through Melville, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, to Rilke, Yeats, Jeffers. There is a sense in which Galway Kinnell has remained faithful to this heritage, though for a long time it handicapped him among those of a more oblique and verbal trend, poets who grew up as it were after Pound. Thus a review of Body Rags (in the New York Review of Books) spent most of its time complaining that Kinnell didn't write like Berryman—as if he hadn't had his chance at that and decided early against it.

Within Kinnell's passionate and personal vein, two drifts have revealed themselves, that of the longer poem prefigured in "A Morning Wake," "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ," and "The Last River," and that of clarified small lyrics aimed at an ultimate transparency. The lyrical tendency reaches its earliest perfection in "First Song" ("Then it was dusk in Illinois") as in the other tender pieces ("Island of Night," "A Walk in the Country") published in Rolfe Humphries' New Poems though not included by Kinnell in any of his volumes. So too with "Spring Oak," a poem that illustrates Kinnell's critical pronouncement in his Beloit "Self-Study": "Only meaning is truly interesting." Even in Body Rags there are such distillates, "The Falls" and "How Many Nights." Reading them, as the "Self-Study" had also said, is "like opening a window on the thing the poem is talking about":

How many nights
have I lain in terror,
O Creator Spirit,
Maker of night and day,

only to walk out
the next morning over the frozen world
hearing under the creaking of snow
faint, peaceful breaths …
… snake,
bear, earthworm, ant …

and above me
a wild crow crying "yaw yaw yaw"
from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life.

Against such poems, the underworld involvement of "The Last River" goes another road, groping through caves and antres of "the flinty, night-smelling depths," "waiting by the grief-tree of the last river."

Kinnell's second book, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock, as the title suggests (strange the Indian name for that solitary mountain on a peneplane should hold the Greek root of the One), is largely in the lyrical mode. Even the Wagnc rian love-death has wonderfully refined itself in "Poems of Night": "A cheekbone. / A curved piece of brow, / A pale eyelid / Float in the dark, / And now I make out / An eye, dark, / wormed with the far-off, unaccountable lights." While the title poem and "Spindrift"—"Sit down / By the clanking shore/Of this bitter, beloved sea"—stand at the pinnacle of the poignantly pure and deeply transparent.

At the moment I have before me various sketches of The Book of Nightmares. For oceanic participation, the section on childbirth ("Maud Moon") goes beyond anything Kinnell has done before:

It is all over, little one,
the flipping
and overleaping,
the watery
somersaulting alone in the oneness
under the hill, under
the old, lonely bellybutton pushing forth again
in remembrance, all over,
the drifting there furled like a flower, pressing
a knee down the slippery
walls, sculpting the whole world, hearing
a few cries from without not even as promises, the stream
of omphalos blood humming all over you.

What distinguishes this from the work of any other poet (though parallels can be found: Roethke, Rilke, even Whitman) is the intuitive immediacy of its entrance into pre-birth and subhuman organic nature.

Of all the poets born in the twenties and thirties, Galway Kinnell is the only one who has taken up the passionate symbolic search of the great American tradition.