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ALLEN GINSBERG, COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1980
Harper & Row, 1984
This Collected Poems has apparently not been a success commercially. Its eight hundred pages, its copious notes (complete with extremely informal photographs of Ginsberg, his friends, his gurus) arrive too late to appeal to a cult, and too early to be necessary to a scholarly industry. Perhaps, also, people feel that the best of Ginsberg has long been available; that, like many poets his age, he did not altogether survive the encouragement the 1960's gave to his didacticism and his cult of spontaneity. But the existence of a Collected Poems at least provides an occasion to think about the most popular, and least seriously discussed, of important postwar poets.
For me, as for many writers and readers of my generation, Howl was the first poem that was News. Its catch-as-catch-can style dragged headlong into poetry that widest sense of "culture" - atomic bombs, "robot apartments," drugs, irregular sex, advertising, the suppression of the Left and its incipient reemergence in aesthetic, or "life-style," disguise - from which Robert Lowell said, in a famous interview, that the poetry of the 1950's was "divorced." The excitement Howl produced was altogether different from the excitement of confirmed interiority I got from the Four Quartets, or Dylan Thomas, or Rimbaud. It would take years, and a much more complex sense of the intersections of public and private in all poetry than I then had, to see these works from a common perspective.
But Ginsberg's style has at least this much in common with T.S. Eliot's: a new generation of readers understood it almost before they had read it; and yet, thirty years later, we have not finished puzzling out all that it means or implies. As Karl Shapiro quickly perceived (though with a hostility born of political disagreements in the 1960s), Ginsberg's telegraphic manner is very much a part of the unsolid, fast-driving, mediaridden world it condemns. But the style makes that world, in turn, the mirror-image of what it would condemn and Ginsberg would flaunt, the "incarnate gaps in space and time" of drug experience. We fly through both worlds, in the poem, with an exhilaration new to literature:
But could anyone believe that this style - "sun and moon...