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...