Galway Kinnell

Biography

Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He teaches at New York University, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing.

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring 2005

Walt Whitman and Negative Capability

By Galway Kinnell

Walt Whitman had Keatsian “negative capability”—a certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within—and speak himself in the process. “I am the man—,” he...