stabbed twice from within ...

“The Book of Nightmares” is no less concerned with death — with how lives are to be lived with the constant awareness that everything begins dying from the moment of inception. But the perspectives are different from those in “Body Rags”: The book-length poem opens with the birth of his first child and closes with the birth of his second, and confronts, among other things, the Vietnam War: “Lieutenant! This corpse will not stop burning.”

After “Nightmares” was published, in 1971, Mr. Kinnell said he felt “an unsettling emptiness for a long time afterward.” Nine years went by before he published another collection, “Mortal Acts, Mortal Words.” Harold Bloom, writing in The New York Times Book Review, took the occasion to say, however kindly, that Mr. Kinnell had not quite vindicated the remarkable promise of “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World.” He thought that Mr. Kinnell was suffering from “a certain over-ambition that makes of each separate poem too crucial an event.”

In any case, Mr. Kinnell was moving on.

“I’ve tried to carry my poetry as far as I could,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far and as long as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant, because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events.”

When his “Selected Poems” won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983, and a share of the National Book Award the same year, it amounted to a fresh appreciation of his best work over 25 years.

Mr. Kinnell was by then well established as a poet, translator, essayist and teacher, dividing his time between the country life in Vermont and Manhattan, where he was a professor and director of the creative writing program at New York University.

His later work became looser and more personal, with ample space for woodsy poems and flights of whimsy. In “Oatmeal,” for example, the mental-health implications of eating the stuff by oneself are such that he summons an imaginary breakfast companion, the dead poet John Keats:

Keats said I was right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey

lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to

disintegrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone.

Serious or droll, Mr. Kinnell was an imposing figure at poetry readings, a big, muscular man with powers of retention that enabled him to recite long pieces from memory, his own and other writers’ as well. One time, he confessed in an interview with Saturday Review, he even mesmerized himself. “I just folded my arms on the lectern and fell asleep,” he said. “I suppose the audience thought I had fallen into a poetic swoon.”