Kinnell's wife, Bobbie Bristol, says he died yesterday afternoon at their home in Sheffield, Vermont. He had leukemia.
Kinnell won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983 for selected poems, and the following year he won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship. In 1989, he was named Vermont's poet laureate.
A Rhode Island native, Kinnell graduated from Princeton University.
Bristol says Kinnell had owned property in Vermont since 1960 but started living there full-time in 2005 after he retired from New York University. In August, he was honored at the Vermont Statehouse.