Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. He was educated at Princeton University and at the University of Rochester in New York. Kinnell began publishing poetry in magazines and anthologies in the early 1950s, and his first collection of poems, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960. In 1983, he received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Selected Poems. About writing poetry, Kinnell has said, "When I found the world of poets, I realized I was not so odd after all. And when, one day, a teacher mentioned that Robert Frost was living and writing on a farm only a few hundred miles north of Pawtucket, I realized that poetry was not an extinct art, that poets could still exist in the world. And I started to write poetry."