The post-World War II poet, Galway Kinnell, died on Tuesday at his home in Sheffield, Vermont. He was 87. His wife, Barbara K. Bristol, attributed his death to leukemia.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 1, 1927 to immigrants—James Kinnell, a carpenter from Scotland, and Elizabeth Mills Kinnell, from Ireland—Kinnell tended to write poems that, in contrast to his Beat and New Critic contemporaries, were more in keeping with the style of Walt Whitman. As Daniel Lewis explains in the obituary at The New York Times, Kinnell “was inclined to go his own way, developing a lyrical style influenced by the past.”

Over the years, his work ebbed and flowed, with some periods of “unsettling emptiness,” Kinnell himself said. In a review of Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980), Harold Bloom claimed that Kinnell’s “largest poetic flaw [was] a certain over-ambition that makes each separate poem too crucial an event.”

Still, Kinnell’s work drew wide acclaim, and in 1983, his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award. He published thirteen books of poetry, which, in addition to the aforementioned books, included, most recently, Strong Is Your Hold (2006); A New Selected Poems (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1994); and When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990). He also published a children’s book, How the Alligator Missed Breakfast (1982); a collection of essays on poetry, Walking Down the Stairs (1978); and a novel, Black Light (1966), as well as translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, François Villon, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Kinnell received many accolades, including the 2010 Wallace Stevens Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, and the 2002 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

In addition to teaching at New York University, where he directed the MFA program for many years, Kinnell also served as poet in residence at the University of California at Irvine, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Brandeis University.

Photo: Picture taken at the Poetry Society of America’s event at AWP’s 2008 Conference & Bookfair in New York City.