Collected poems 1947-1980.

IT IS MY impression that Allen Ginsberg is, if not exactly underrated, at least taken for granted--not really seen as a poet, which is much the same thing. People believe they know him and his work when they have not read much of it, or really paid attention to it. There is a tendency to consign him to a particular cultural moment--the late 1950s and the early to mid 1960s, when the Beat writers emerged, followed by the developing mass counterculture; and it has to be said that Ginsberg himself, by the cultivation of his public persona, is to some degree responsible for that identification. However, the fact of the matter is that Ginsberg is a remarkable poet, who has written some of the best poetry of our time. The present volume arrives, therefore, at an auspicious moment, and is bound to produce a general reassessment of his work.

Allen Ginsberg first came to general attention in 1953 with Howl, followed in 1961 by the still more powerful Kaddish, both published as pamphlets by the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Both books had a major impact on younger readers and writers, and to understand this--apart from the intrinsic quality of the poetry--one must recall the literary situation at the time.

For young writers, and even for younger teachers and critics, the High Modernists who had emerged during the early decades of the twentieth century were almost literally godlike. Think of Hugh Kenner's book The Pound Era: Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Pound, Joyce, Proust, Mann--these writers seemed to transcend ordinary humanity. They were on every university's syllabus. They seemed implausibly learned. The array of literary techniques each of them deployed was breathtaking, and they seemed to be philosophically profound, the keepers of the mysteries of the ages. Ulysses and--migod--Finnegans Wake. The Waste Land. The Cantos (brush up, please, on your Chinese and your medieval Latin. The Magic Mountain. Proust and his cookie. "Sailing to Byzantium." High Modernism did not seem to be literature, but rather sacred text. If this was writing, then how could anyone possibly write?

It was in this context that Allen Ginsberg, seconded by several of the writers associated with him, such as Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso, did a remarkable thing. They wrote, they just did it, often magnificently; and by doing so they made writing seem possible again.

Ginsberg rescued us from the power of High Modernism by appealing to the alternative and no less sophisticated tradition of Whitman, the Song of the Self; an appeal that succeded because Ginsberg is a great writer. Even minor Ginsberg is memorable, as in his 1958 jeu d'esprit about Lionel Trilling, a professor of his at Columbia. The poem is called "The Lion for Real," the conceit being, "I came home and found a lion in my living room. . . . He didn't cameeat me." Trilling could have that effect on a student. There are many poems in the relaxed vein of a 1957 poem entitled "Wrote This Last Night": Listen to the tale of the sensitive car who was coughed up out of earth in Pittsburgh. She screamed like a Swedish Prime Minister on her first flight down the red neon highway.

I don't know whether Tage Erlander screamed a lot, but it's a good line anyway.

But then there is major Ginsberg, as in Kaddish, the word designating the Jewish lament for the beloved dead, in this case Ginsberg's mother. In my opinion Kaddish is one of the finest pieces of writing in American literature, the Jewish sensibility fused with the Whitmanesque: Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph. the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing how we suffer--

Naomi Ginsberg, mentally ill much of the time, is the tormented muse behind the poetry. She died in 1956, the year--not coincidentally, I suppose--of Howl.

Time will tell how the poetry stands up, but in my judgment, as I say, Kaddish is a great poem, right up there with "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." And Kaddish is specifically a great American poem-- even a great Columbia poem--with its incorporation of Shelley's "Adonais," the elegy on Keats, which Ginsberg undoubtedly encountered in Lionel Trilling's course on the Romantics.

Along with his poetic development, Ginsberg has also undergone a marked religious development, foreshadowed in the earliest poems. From the start he has been God-hungry, even ravenous for the divine. From Kaddish: sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other, worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while it lasts, a Vision--anything more? It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder, Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shouldering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky and instant--and the sky above--an old blue place. r down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk to the Lower East Side--where you walked 50 years ago, little girl--from Russia. . . .

Naomi is Ginsberg's Beatrice, lower Manhattan his Florence. In the later poetry, much of it splendid, the God-hunger/Naomi-passion turns Eastward and we get the Buddhist Ginsberg. Whitman would not have been surprised, and neither would Eliot. Shantih.

We needed this Collected Poems, which comes at the right time. Ginsberg's successive volumes have appeared in paperback editions from non-mainstream publishers, and many of them have been hard to come by. The present volume shows the scale of his achievement and makes the entire sequence through 1980 available. Pulitzer Prize people, please take notice.