SOURCE: Shechner, Mark. “Allen Ginsberg: The Poetics of Power.” In After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination, pp. 180-95. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Shechner determines the impact of Ginsberg's poetry on cultural and political events in the 1960s and 1970s and deems him “America's leading and perhaps only example of a power poet.”

I. the Enlightenment

Living in an age of ornamental poetry in which the essential obligation of the poet is to produce allegories of his own sensitivity, we are likely to find ourselves out of touch with the audacious last line of Shelley's “A Defense of Poetry”: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” What possible relation, we are bound to wonder, does our poetry have to legislation, to politics, to power? And if we could locate those elements in poetry that might bear some plausible connection to...