Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Kinnell said that as a youth he became interested in the poetry of American dark Romantics such as Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, drawn to both the musical appeal of their poetry and the allure of their use of language which spoke to what he later described as the homogeneous feel of his hometown, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He also described himself as being an introvert in his adolescence, which scholars have compared to the aforementioned authors' histories of leading solitary lives.[4]
Kinnell studied at Princeton University, graduating in 1948 alongside friend and fellow poet W.S. Merwin. He received his master of arts degree from the University of Rochester.[5] He traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, and went to Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. During the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States caught his attention. Upon returning to the US, he joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and worked on voter registration and workplace integration in Hammond, Louisiana. This effort got him arrested. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[6] Alongside other personal themes and anxieties, Kinnell drew upon both his involvement with the civil rights movement and his experiences protesting against the Vietnam War in his 1971 poem cycle The Book of Nightmares.[7]
Kinnell has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal. From 1989 to 1993 he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont.[8]
Kinnell was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University and a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. As of 2011 he was retired and resided at his home in Vermont[8] until his death in October 2014 from leukemia.[9]
