["Endless Life" is assembled from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's] own choice of his work from the last 25 years. We can see the range of these poems spread out on the page, and they still hold.

Oh, yes, the influences leap out at you; E. E. Cummings and Kenneth Patchen ring from almost every page. And, fairly early on, when one can imagine Ferlinghetti realizing that all those young people were listening to him, the political rhetoric begins, and rolls on, muddled, to this day. But these are not terrible sins when the poetry sings; indeed, Cummings and Patchen and irate populist litanies might do us a great deal of good now.

In his poems there is also the quick pickup of—and slide away from—literary history, prefiguring a great deal of recent, less well done poeticizing by others. Ferlinghetti's poetic allusions are real parts of his poems and not...