Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell (born February 1, 1927, in Providence, Rhode Island – October 28, 2014) is one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the 20th century.

Quotes

 * A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
 * First Song (1983).


 * The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness. It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.
 * Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1976).


 * The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
 * Saint Francis and the Sow (1986).


 * I take a wolf's rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears.
 * The Bear (1974).

Quotes about Galway Kinnell

 * I read a lot of poetry. I keep up, as much as possible, with modern American poetry and I think that I'm very influenced by its rhythms. I like Walt Whitman, and I read all of Yeats a couple of months ago... I've read Galway Kinnell and Carolyn Kizer and Bob Hass, and some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick.
 * 1980 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)