SOURCE: Castellitto, George P. “Imagism and Allen Ginsberg's Manhattan Locations: The Movement from Spatial Reality to Written Image.” Colby Quarterly 35, no. 2 (June 1999): 117-28.

In the following essay, Castellitto perceives an affinity between Ginsberg's utilization of Manhattan images in his verse and the Imagist poets of the early twentieth century.

Allen Ginsberg's excursions into the streets of Greenwich Village in the 1950's brought him in contact with a host of specific locations and objects that he catalogues in much of his early poetry. Ginsberg has been labeled as mystic, guru, and howler, but beneath the stark epithets and undaunted vocabulary of his poetry lies his affinity with the early Imagist poets of the twentieth century: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell. Ginsberg himself admitted that, besides the works of Whitman, Kerouac, and the Bible, “imagist practices” were “immediate resources” for his poetic vision (Muckle 20). Ginsberg perceives the...