Herb’s gifts are not here everywhere and all at once apparent as they were in his book of profiles of ten American literary lives, as his subject, the influential poet and mentor whose livelihood and passion was in the medical care of children, and in the birthing rooms.
“Paterson,” his amazing work of local color transformed to bigness of heart and of literary sound instinct is, in fact, out of step with the rest or the bulk of his short pithy style governed or wishing to be so governed by his mandate (forever quoted by one whom “Doc Williams”most greatly influenced, Allen Ginsberg, whom Williams befriended, encouraged, championed … and knew to be mad: “no idea but in things,” as in his “Red Wheelbarrow,” the best k own, perhaps most remarkable work.
He and the more mature Allen Ginsberg, poet were a sort of mutual aid society of two, each praising the other in print … Williams , in “Paterson,” also the home town of each, places Allen’s charmingly innocent and overwhelmingly ambitious wish list of celebratory success before the world of the reader, word-for-word.
It’s true nevertheless, that the style of Williams, is generally soft in tone and lyrical, and that of Ginsberg …well!!
It seems that Allen did learn taste, decorum and disciple in poetry in part under Williams’ example if not direct influence. Critics of Allen simply do not understand the exceptional power of his innovation, nor the greatness and strength of tradition that always worked behind the scene in his creative composition of his great early work Ling and short of the first two City Lights books, all leading to his Kaddish, his greatest work, arguably more devoutly constructed than the Adonais of Shelley from whom Allen borrows, quotes.
To find a eulogy in English of comparable might, one needs return to Lycidas; to find long verse on contemplative themes, one would return from Howl ad Kaddish to Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode … by the way, Allen’s favourite poem
To return toWiliams whose collegial friendships were
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