SOURCE: Everett, Nicholas. “Pushing Seventy.” Times Literary Supplement (10 February 1995): 22.

In the following mixed review, Everett considers the poems in Cosmopolitan Greetings as candid yet inconsistent.

It will be forty years in October since Allen Ginsberg gave his historic first reading of “Howl” (in San Francisco), the poem which so spectacularly launched his poetic career and put the Beat Generation on the American literary and cultural map. Looking back at the various outraged responses the poem inspired, the one that now seems strangest is not the (unsuccessful) prosecution for obscenity (some of Ginsberg's poems still can't be broadcast on American radio during the day) but the objection from the literary “establishment” that the poem was wild and wholly lacking in craft. What has become clear over the intervening years is just how systematic and considered Ginsberg's methods are. Indeed, next to this anarchic beatnik, many formalist and traditionalist poets...