[In the following excerpt, Kinnell 's first book of verse is commended for its direct, colloquial language unfettered by contemporary influences.]

Galway Kinnell's … first book of poems, What a Kingdom It Was is remarkably unburdened by this or that current influence. Kinnell is direct and occasionally harsh, and he keeps his syntax straight and his tone colloquial. His chief concern, we soon discover, is the enigmatic significance, more than the open appearance, of Nature and man. "Freedom, New Hampshire," an elegy for his brother—a full realization of country boyhood, in ordinary terms, with a boy's confrontation of cruelty and unreasonable happiness left intact—is also an affirmation of immortality. Kinnell's longest and most pretentiously titled poem, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World," deals with a most difficult subject—life in a city slum. Here pitfalls abound—sentimentality, insincerity, the possibility of mixed and unresolved feelings of pity and guilt. Kinnell bypasses all these. City streets are for a time his home; he feels the vitality of their people; he responds with extreme sensitiveness to multiple sights, sounds, smells; without any furtive condescension, he places Avenue C in the human context. Sympathy, identification, insight sustain this long poem in every detail, and Kinnell chooses his details with startling exactness.