Allen Ginsberg Critical Essay | Allen Ginsberg

Critical Essay by Alicia Ostriker

SOURCE: "'Howl' Revisited: The Poet as Jew," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 4, 1997, pp. 28-31.

[In the following essay, Ostriker argues that while Ginsberg rejected elements of his Jewish heritage, it still influenced his writing.]

I have reverenced Allen Ginsberg—man and poet—for three decades and see no reason to stop now. The first time I met Allen I was amazed, as this essay suggests, by his voice: the power and sweetness and humor of it. His breath, I thought, was the breath of the spirit. The last time was the same but more so. We were at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, N.J., in the soft weather of early fall, 1996. At dinner I told him I had written an essay about him as a Jew, that he would probably disapprove of, and he shrugged this off and talked about his new apartment. He was looking ailing...
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