Cleaver shot at, jail'd, maddened, parole revoked, Vietnam War flesh-heap grows higher. What spontaneity gains, reiteration loses. I still tend to prefer the shorter poems, because they allow some drawing of breath for relief from Ginsberg's ardent atlas. And I like best the poems where Ginsberg is still visited by evanescent flashes of his old humor, too often now in abeyance. Sadness, and not his intermittent hysteria, underlies Ginsberg's most eloquent poems.
Elegy presents everything as lost and gone or absent and future.
The elegiac side of Ginsberg still seems to me the winning one, but it may be that in the sparseness of middle age Ginsberg needs the plurality of notations and enumerations accumulating to fill these pages. It may be that later, in the subsidence and condensation of this tireless relief-map of America, we will have from Ginsberg the sort of quintessential late poetry of old age that we have already received from Yeats and Stevens. Helen Vendler teaches at Boston University and is completing a book on the poetry of George Herbert.