Customer Reviews

Collected Poems 1947-1997

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I just finished reading Ginsberg's collected poems, 1947-1997 -- fifty years and over a thousand pages of poetry. My overall impression is that he was probably the kindest, most moral member of the beat generation. When the other beats were penniless & borrowing money, Ginsberg was the one they borrowed money from. Corso would steal Ginsberg's manuscripts and sell them to used book dealers to score heroin, and each time Ginsberg would walk down to the book dealer and buy back his priceless words. Where Kerouac preached his own version of buddhism and gave it up a few years later for alcoholic catholicism, Ginsberg remained a dedicated student of buddhist compassion to the end of his days.

And that's what shines thru in many of these poems -- compassion, attention to the present, and the courage to be so honest about his life and his feelings. Many of these poems are raw, experimental, informal, and spontaneous, almost like journal entries. He wrote numerous classics -- Pull My Daisy (written with Kerouac & Cassady in 1949), Howl, America, Kaddish, Mescaline, Lysergic Acid, Wichita Vortex Sutra, Wales Visitation, Elegy for Neal Cassady, and Memory Gardens (elegy for Jack Kerouac), among others.

Some of the most common themes are world travel, nature, daily events, progressive politics, the US invasion of Vietnam, the peace movement, road trips, drug use, the beats, gay sex, hinduism, buddhism, death, and love. In other words, Ginsberg wrote about his life. He talks about his friends dying, his father dying, his mother's insanity and death, his loves, his joys, and whatever is pressing and interesting to him at the moment. Some of the poems are better than others, but I can't imagine there's a more honest poet out there.

Casual readers of the beats will likely want to skip around and read a poem here, a poem there, just checking out the highlights. But even for casual readers, there's no sense in buying Ginsberg's small City Lights books -- just buy this big book so you can have it all.

Americans who can't name five poets will name Allen Ginsberg. In this case, that is good since he was one of America's Greatest Poets. This book attest to this.
I write this review to show disappointment in the publisher who continues to publish the collected works on the cheapest paper next to newsprint.
For the next edition, I would like to see, at least in limited edition, a volume printed on quality paper which could last more than a few years before turning yellow.
Ginsbergs deserves better treatment.

This book contains almost all of Ginsberg's poetry. If you are one of those people that must have all of his poems, a great purchase would be The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice. It is his journals and early poems from 1937-1952. You will have every poem that he wrote and his journal. Also, you can buy his book of letters too.

If you just want the poems of Allen Ginsberg, this is all that you need. Absolutely everything (Except for readings, photography and such). If you're considering getting a complete works, you probably don't need a lot of convincing with regards to the merits of Ginberg's poetry. However, I will say that though I am not crazy about a few of the minor poems that he published in his later books, he always stepped it up when it came to the big stuff. And in case you've just read one of the million or so copies out there of Howl, Ginsberg didn't shock the world and make of his life time to smoke weed and watch cartoons. Kaddish blew my mind, and the subtleties of Plutonian Ode come to me all the time when I'm daydreaming. I must admit, I love the pocket poets additions, and have most of Ginsberg's stuff that was printed in those. Then I bought this. Truth is, by the time you've bought two of those you've paid for a little over the price of this. Those little books are nice though and they are what I use. Really doesn't matter all that much how a person reads the poetry I figure & so I will mostly emphasize that all of the books Ginsberg published with City Lights are worth having (the majority of this book). There are at least two poems of Ginsberg that are of the magnitude of Howl (& given the all-encompassing (and not-so-compressed) nature of The Fall of America I would make it 3) & they were written by a more mature poet.

Allen Ginsberg's work is powerful. I highly recommend this book! Although not always as cheerful as you may wish him to be, Ginsberg brings the reality of life to these poems.

Ginsberg's poems are the bardic cries of the American counter-culture. His recitation of "Howl" in a San Francisco bookstore in 1955 changed America and the world forever. How one poem can have such an effect is astounding and I can think of no other poetic work that has had such an impact. Regardless of one's political or religious leanings, if one is to seriously study and read American poetry, then one must come to terms with the works of Allen Ginsberg. This volume contains it all.

Ginsberg has always been an enigma to me. He certainly has sparks of genius; the justly famous "Howl" and the in some ways even better "Footnote to Howl" are excellent poems, and he has quite a few other poems of near-equal calibre (I find they tend to centre around "Howl").

Nonetheless, he falls short of being a first-rate poet. He is well worth reading, because he is an important figure and a better poet than most, but he falls short of the greatness of other 20th century American poets like Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, etc., and well short of the greatness of a Yeats. [I will admit I am a bit old-fashioned in my poetic tastes, and this may shine through here, so perhaps some may appreciate the avante garde, rather risque poetry of Ginsberg a bit more than I!]

That said, there is a lot of schlock here too, a lot of poems that are just downright bad. Overall, unfortunately, the bad-to-mediocre poems outweigh the good-to-great ones, which is why I weight this volume lower. Perhaps a "Selected Poems" would be a better choice, one well-edited to sift out the good from the bad; I know volumes like this exist, but I haven't looked through any of them enough to recommend a particular edition.

Some have tried to name Ginsberg the inheritor of Blake's legacy, but this hardly seems appropriate. Ginsberg was a fan of Blake, and, if I'm not mistaken, claimed to have seen Blake in visions, but he just lacks the visionary and linguistic power of a Blake. Others claim him the just inheritor of Whitman; in this, he is lacking too.

Such comparisons are faulty, and should not be made. Ginsberg is a strong poet, but he doesn't hold up to the Whitmans and Blakes of the world, and it is truly unfair to try to compare the two in such a way.