[4] As an undergraduate at Yale (1969–73) Kane worked with poets Mark Strand, Richard Howard, and Jean Valentine and studied literature with Cleanth Brooks and Harold Bloom.

After the Fulbright year in Australia, where he befriended poets Vincent Buckley, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Gwen Harwood, Kevin Hart, Philip Hodgins and Les Murray, he worked with John Hollander, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman at the Yale Graduate School.

During that time, his first book of poems was published by George Braziller in New York, The Farther Shore (1989), which Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky described as "a dark echo of Robert Frost.

And always it seemed we had passed that point before, and the landscapes converged to a simple prospect, a single wish: that everything recurring for us might end, the coming and going over the same ground, that we might split the cost of turning forward to begin again—payment in exchange for all we may have changed.

In 1994, Kane co-edited the Library of America edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations, and brought out the following year, Poetry of the American Renaissance: A Diverse Anthology from the Romantic Period (1995, rev.

"[13] Kane's second book of poems, Drowned Lands (2000), continued the personal and historical themes explored in his earlier collection.

Harold Bloom praised Kane for adding to "the Virgilian elegance of The Farther Shore a quality of quizzical wisdom.

In 2011, a collection of his poems was translated into Chinese as The Scholar's Rock, and, in 2013, Kane collaborated with the Irish sound artist Katie O'Looney to make Seven Catastrophes in Four Movements (Farpoint Recordings).

[18] In 2017, Kane collaborated with the Australian poet John Kinsella on a co-authored book, Renga: 100 Poems, published in Australia by GloriaSMH Press.

[22] As a scholar of American literature, Kane writes primarily on the work of the Transcendentalists, particularly Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he also focuses on contemporary poetry and criticism.

A founding member of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies in 1986, and President from 1991-96, he was Poetry Editor of its journal Antipodes from 1987 to 2022.

[27] Kane is included in a volume of interviews of writers and intellectuals by Cassandra Atherton, In So Many Words (2013), which also features Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom.

"[29] "The special paradox of Kane's achievement is to have crafted a form of address as deceptively open as Walt Whitman's, while being as edgy and as spiritually cryptic as Emily Dickinson.

"[30] "There are so many influences and traditions underpinning this work, yet it speaks to a reader with simplicity and clarity, so that one comes not merely to enjoy, but to value its irony and its philosophical refinement.

[35] In 2013, Paul Kane was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (honoris causa) from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.