Before getting down to this book I had already reached the opinion, quite long ago, that Ginsberg was the most genuinely gifted poet of his generation, but that he had gone astray, gone to pot (literally in this case) and “blew it,” as they say. The poetry I’ve read in the past two decades seemed incredibly boring and shrill, long‑winded and obsessed, a waste. Reading the Collected Poems from beginning to end is a different kind of experience, a search for causes, connections, developments and understanding, if possible. I don’t know if my earlier opinion has changed much, but here it is.

Ginsberg is a poet who has gone through hell, and not in a hurry. The misery of his earlier years, described in the poem “Kaddish” and elsewhere, left him maimed and incapacitated for life. William Carlos Williams, who knew him as a youngster in Paterson, N. J., said “I never thought he’d grow up and write a book of poems.” His mother’s political fanaticism (she was a fervent communist) and her subsequent madness and death in an insane asylum remain with him: in a sense his mother’s political obsession continues in his poetry in a different form. His homosexual loves and his morbid erethism are displayed and explored with utter frankness and in explicit detail; they add a constant spice of sensational self‑revelation to the poetry.

But the man who can’t put his own head together—or his life— begins to preach to the world. Out of his personal trouble and alienation he rises suddenly to the theme of total condemnation of society, and of the world, and he becomes a prophet of spiritual revelation, announcing a visionary gospel. The visionary doctrine he propounds is a mixture of romantic transcendental philosophy derived from William Blake, Walt Whitman and a long array of Buddhist and mystical teachers. It should be added that this high vision is always combined, in a comic‑slapstick fashion, with the most realistic and sordid details of contemporary life—headline news, sensational media rubble, private acts of copulation, and the biographical facts of life on skid row (muggings, jailings, murders, street sex, drugs, and plain boredom). All this has been sufficiently written about elsewhere as the so‑called “alternative” or Beat culture of contemporary America.

What matters here is the connection with poetry. One could read the poetry as poetry and leave the psychology to the experts. But the pattern of ideas is so central, obsessive and representative, that it’s worth looking at briefly.

The furious ferment of creativity in this poetry is unquestioned. And it is all spontaneous—“First thought, best thought,” as he says—and unrevised. It reveals a state of mental turbulence—“the majestic flaws of my mind which have left my brain open to hallucination”—that is astonishing and inexhaustible. Now the visionary state of mind is what we call “apocalyptic” in poetry. It is a revelation of ultimate things. But as Ginsberg put it quite early, “This is the one and only firmament. . . There is no other world.” Therefore the vision becomes a revelation of this world as the eternal world. But this world, to Ginsberg and to most visionaries, is a living hell. Therefore the vision demands the total destruction of the world as part of the complex of ideas. Hence his obsession with America as hell and his expectation of world destruction, the major theme of his poetry.

The result is what might be called total politics, blanket judgments of a whole society that do not allow for discrimination or partial improve­ment. Ginsberg of course finds himself incapable of accepting the details and responsibilities of ordinary life, or of exercising any civic or reform­ist zeal, therefore his emotions fire full blast at the total “system.” He doesn’t take sides: he is a prophet of doom. And behind that a confused mystic struggles to emerge, but it is one who cannot achieve peace or serenity of mind. Therefore his Buddhist religion is never really convinc­ing; it is only part of the hilarious show.

This may seem like a cruel analysis of a passionate prophet, a great truth‑speaker and a wonderfully honest poet. Stripping himself naked before an audience (as he did) seems to be the symbolic act that sum­marizes all his poetry. But a critic has a responsibility to write honestly as well as the poet. Ginsberg indulges in extravagant obscenities and seems to be absolutely frank about his own behaviour. But he is not totally unin­hibited, as some might think. There are depths of perversity in human nature that he has not even touched: if we follow the road of total release that he has marked we will see why society set up inhibitions and laws in the first place. The Manson murders and similar diversions will be mere fairy tales to what the real breakdown of inhibition may bring.

But to return to poetry, Ginsberg’s program and method begin with Walt Whitman. It is with the Whitmanic long line and the crazy catalogue that he finds his own voice, around 1949, and, eventually, writes the poem “Howl” (1956). He becomes the prophet to “These States,” after Whit­man, and then a prophet to the world. After this he seems to discover Ezra Pound, and his poetry acquires the aesthetic force and compression derived from Pound’s Pisan Cantos. But with Pound’s staggered line and stricter measure there comes also a fanaticism of tone which adds nothing to the poetry, as in the poem “War Profit Litany.” It simply reinforces what was already there. Ginsberg is not a poet of ideas, he is a poet of one idea. But the contact with Pound sharpens his poetic line. Another source of intensity is the poetry of Hart Crane, which can be heard in poems such as “Violence” (1968) and others. This is highly charged rhetoric that produces much fantastic phrase‑making and many pages of macadamized catalogue. Finally, in the later poetry, 1979 and after, we get “rhymed poetry”—really doggerel—of an extraordinary banality and flatness. Some of this is popular song lyric, offered with the music, but as poetry it doesn’t come off.

Poetry was once an art in which the poem was all that mattered; it was either a fine poem or it was not. But somewhere along the road, with romanticism and modernism, the idea of the poet as a great lifegiver and messianic prophet has crept in—and also the associated idea of creative energy in itself, exuberance, as the raw stuff of poetry—so that the poem has now disintegrated into rhetorical rant and the crude display of personality. Poets such as Whitman and D. H. Lawrence were harbingers of this idea. It is a great tragedy for poetry that this ideology of the prophet and the powerhouse has taken over in the popular mind and in the minds of poets. These elements can raise poetry, of course, with their demand for greater meaning and for richness of life, but they can also destroy it by their exclusive persuasiveness and reductive power.

Allen Ginsberg curiously resembles Walt Whitman in that his big fat book is for the most part unreadable, and yet contains moving and memorable passages. No one will deny the force and power of “Howl” and “Kaddish.” But there are shorter ones that redeem the whole as well: “Sunflower Sutra,” “My Sad Self,” “Café In Warsaw,” and several others. Unfortunately, the reader must plow through a great deal of verbiage and junk to discover such fine poems for himself.