SOURCE: "The Reversed Pietà: Allen Ginsberg's 'Kaddish'," in Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, Belknap Press, 1995, pp. 9-15.

[In the following excerpt, Vendler discusses Ginsberg's use of traditional Jewish prayer, the influence of other writers, and his observations on his mother in the poem "Kaddish."]

The poem "Kaddish," now thirty years old, appeared in 1961 with two manifestos by Ginsberg bracketing it. The first, on the copyright page of the volume Kaddish, announced that "the established literary quarterlies of my day are bankrupt poetically thru their own hatred, dull ambition or loudmouthed obtuseness," and, in acknowledging previous appearances of the poems in journals, remarked that two of those publications were begun by "youths who quit editing university magazines to avoid hysterical academic censorship." This Ginsberg manifesto is one of irritated satiric energy; the other, appearing on the back cover of the volume, abounds in passionate phrases like "broken consciousness," "suffering...