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...