Books, Arts & Manners: Allen Ginsberg, Poet

Collected Poems 1947-1980, by Allen Ginsberg (Harper & Row, 837 pp., $27.50)

It is my impression that Allen Ginsberg is, if not exactly underrated, at least taken for granted—not really seen as a poet, which is much the same thing. People believe they know him and his work when they have not read much of it, or really paid attention to it. There is a tendency to consign him to a particular cultural moment—the late 1950s and the early to mid 1960s, when the Beat writers emerged, followed by the developing mass counterculture; and it has to be said that Ginsberg himself, by the cultivation of his public persona, is to some degree responsible for that identification. However, the fact of the matter is that Ginsberg is a remarkable poet, who has written some of the best poetry of our time. The present volume arrives, therefore, at an auspicious moment, and is bound to produce a general reassessment of his work.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Collected Poems 1947-1980, by Allen Ginsberg (Harper & Row, 837 pp., $27.50)

It is my impression that Allen Ginsberg is, if not exactly underrated, at least taken for granted—not really seen as a poet, which is much the same thing. People believe they know him and his work when they have not read much of it, or really paid attention to it. There is a tendency to consign him to a particular cultural moment—the late 1950s and the early to mid 1960s, when the Beat writers emerged, followed by the developing mass counterculture; and it has to be said that Ginsberg himself, by the cultivation of his public persona, is to some degree responsible for that identification. However, the fact of the matter is that Ginsberg is a remarkable poet, who has written some of the best poetry of our time. The present volume arrives, therefore, at an auspicious moment, and is bound to produce a general reassessment of his work.