Galway Kinnell

1927 — 2014

Galway Kinnell was an American poet whose Selected Poems (1980) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and whose work — rooted in the physical world, the body, and the act of living and dying — made him one of the most important American poets of the second half of the twentieth century.

Past sales0

PeriodModern

NationalityAmerican

1. Biography

A short life of the author

Galway Kinnell (1927–2014) was born on 1 February 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island. He studied at Princeton University and the University of Rochester. He taught at New York University and was a civil rights activist in the 1960s.

Life and Career

Kinnell’s early work was formally conventional, but Body Rags (1968) and The Book of Nightmares (1971) — a ten-section sequence inspired by Rilke’s Duino Elegies — represented a breakthrough into a more visceral, physically grounded poetry. The Book of Nightmares is a meditation on mortality, birth, parenthood, and the body that remains one of the essential American long poems.

Selected Poems (1980) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983 — one of the few collections to win both.

Major Works and Themes

Kinnell wrote about the body, nature, mortality, and the continuity between human and animal life. His poetry is sensuous, deeply physical, and committed to the conviction that the material world is sacred.

Key Works

The Book of Nightmares (1971)
Selected Poems (1980) — Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award

Collecting Kinnell

What a Kingdom It Was first edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1960) — his debut — brings $50–$100. The Book of Nightmares (Houghton Mifflin, 1971) brings $30–$60. Kinnell died in 2014.