Books, Arts & Manners: Virus Time

White Shroud: Poems, 1980-1985, by Allen Ginsberg (Harper & Row, 89 pp., $8.95)

Allen Ginsberg is an interesting poet, in spite of himself, and with at least one great poem, Kaddish, he has earned himself a permanent place in American letters. I say “in spite of himself,” for he has absorbed without redeeming irony the idea of the poet as “other”—anti-bourgeois, criminal, sexually deviant, traitorous. But these “outrageous” guises become so predictable that they turn into clichés. If only Ginsberg would understand that what would be really outrageous would be to wear a Brooks Brothers suit.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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White Shroud: Poems, 1980-1985, by Allen Ginsberg (Harper & Row, 89 pp., $8.95)

Allen Ginsberg is an interesting poet, in spite of himself, and with at least one great poem, Kaddish, he has earned himself a permanent place in American letters. I say “in spite of himself,” for he has absorbed without redeeming irony the idea of the poet as “other”—anti-bourgeois, criminal, sexually deviant, traitorous. But these “outrageous” guises become so predictable that they turn into clichés. If only Ginsberg would understand that what would be really outrageous would be to wear a Brooks Brothers suit.