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SOURCE: Vendler, Helen. “American X-Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry.” New Yorker 72, no. 33 (4 November 1996): 98-102.
In the following mixed assessment of Selected Poems, 1947-1995, Vendler views Ginsberg's verse as an insightful record of late twentieth-century American history.
In a poem to Allen Ginsberg, Czeslaw Milosz wrote:
I envy your courage of absolute defiance, words inflamed, the fierce maledictions of a prophet. … Your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality. … And your journalistic clichés, your beard and beads and your dress of a rebel of another epoch are forgiven.
Allen Ginsberg, at the beginning of his Selected Poems 1947-1995, gives his own definition of his “absolute defiance”: “I imagined a force field of language counter to the hypnotic force-field control apparatus of media Government secret police & military with their Dollar billions of inertia, disinformation, brainwash, mass hallucination.”
Ginsberg's...
This section contains 2,692 words (approx. 9 pages at 300 words per page) |
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