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SOURCE: "American X-rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry," in New Yorker, November 4, 1996, pp. 98-102.
[In the following review of Selected Poems 1947–1995, Vendler argues that Ginsberg's poems raise consciousness.]
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 "force field" came to public notice with the publication of...
This section contains 2,679 words (approx. 9 pages at 300 words per page) |
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