SOURCE: Trigilio, Tony. “‘Strange Prophecies Anew’: Rethinking the Politics of Matter and Spirit in Ginsberg's ‘Kaddish.’” American Literature 71, no. 4 (December 1999): 773-95.

In the following essay, Trigilio contrasts “Howl” and “Kaddish” and determines the “complex role ‘Kaddish’ plays in Ginsberg's development of a contemporary poetics of prophecy.”

Too often critics conflate Allen Ginsberg's best-known poems, “Howl” and “Kaddish,” and in the process understate important differences between them. The reasons for this conflation are clear enough: both are interventions in Western prophecy, and both conjoin religion and politics in an effort to decenter Cold War sexual-political orthodoxy and to highlight the “beatitude” of downtrodden, even oppressed, protagonists. Yet exaggerating the similarities between the two poems fails to do justice to the complex role “Kaddish” plays in Ginsberg's development of a contemporary poetics of prophecy. Specifically, such exaggeration neglects four revisionary strategies in “Kaddish”: the recovery of a female principle of...