In the following essay, Podhoretz recalls his disputes with Ginsberg and provides a critical assessment of his work and contribution to American poetry.

In the following essay, Harris surveys the correspondence between three of the predominant figures in the Beat Movement and elucidates its insight into the relationship between the Cold War and Beat Movement.

In the following essay, Trigilio contrasts “Howl” and “Kaddish” and determines the “complex role ‘Kaddish’ plays in Ginsberg's development of a contemporary poetics of prophecy.”

In the following excerpt, Spiegelman finds parallels between the work of Ginsberg, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Pinsky.

In the following essay, Woods places Ginsberg's poetry within the gay tradition and considers the function of sexuality in his work.

In the following essay, Portugés details Ginsberg's visionary experiences and their effect on his poetry.

In the following essay, Bawer explores the reasons for Ginsberg's renown and considerable reputation.

[In the following interview, Ginsberg discusses inspiration and his role in American poetry.]

In the following essay, Ostriker regards Ginsberg as a Jewish poet.

In the following excerpt, Jamison and Eyerman regard the role of radical politics on the work of Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy and deem the three authors “central actors in the reconceptualization of American culture that was taking place in the postwar period and, more important, in planting seeds that would sprout in the 1960s.”

In the following essay, Shechner determines the impact of Ginsberg's poetry on cultural and political events in the 1960s and 1970s and deems him “America's leading and perhaps only example of a power poet.”

[In the following essay, Docherty compares Ginsberg's work with that of Walt Whitman, arguing that they are similar in subject and philosophy but not style.]

In the following essay, Diggory views Ginsberg's poetry as part of the pastoral tradition.

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

In the following essay, Honan traces Ginsberg's role in the development of the Beat Movement in American literature and discusses the influences on both Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

[In the following interview, Ginsberg discusses censorship of his works, politics, and his reaction to fame.]

In the following essay, Jarraway discusses “Wichita Vortex Sutra” as emblematic of Vietnam and postmodern literature.

In the following essay, Castellitto perceives an affinity between Ginsberg's utilization of Manhattan images in his verse and the Imagist poets of the early twentieth century.

In the following review, Klawans assesses Ginsberg's contribution to American poetry.

In the following essay, Stephenson analyzes “Howl” as “essentially a record of psychic process and … its relationship to spiritual and literary traditions and to archetypal patterns.”

[In the following excerpt, Stephenson argues that Ginsberg's focus in "Howl" is transcendence in contemporary life.]

[In the following essay, Grossman discusses Ginsberg's contribution to Jewish poetry, focusing particularly on Kaddish.]

In the following essay, Reilly explores Ginsberg's status as an outsider and its impact on his work.

In the following mixed assessment of Selected Poems, 1947-1995, Vendler views Ginsberg's verse as an insightful record of late twentieth-century American history.

In the following essay, Vendler perceives “Kaddish” as “chiefly an elegy of the body—the physical body and the historically conditioned body of Naomi Ginsberg.”

[In the following excerpt, Vendler discusses Ginsberg's use of traditional Jewish prayer, the influence of other writers, and his observations on his mother in the poem "Kaddish."]

[In the following review of Selected Poems 1947–1995, Vendler argues that Ginsberg's poems raise consciousness.]

[In the following obituary, Hampton eulogizes Ginsberg, providing a review of his life and work.]

In the following essay, Peters provides a stylistic analysis of Ginsberg's verse, defining it as “funky” poetry.

[In the following obituary, the critic discusses Ginsberg's role as a voice of protest and his contribution to the Beat movement.]

In the following review, Chidley considers the renewed commercial and critical interest in Ginsberg's verse as well as the poet's political and social concerns.

[In the following review of Planet News, Zweig argues that Ginsberg pushes poetry forward in subject matter and style.]

In the following essay, originally published in 1969, Parkinson debates the poetic value of Ginsberg's verse, contending that it belongs “in the area of religious and spiritual exploration rather than that of aesthetic accomplishment.”

[In the following essay, Parkinson considers whether Ginsberg is truly a poet, centering his discussion on Planet News.]

[In the following review of Journals Mid-Fifties, Theroux argues that the journals are often dull and reveal little of Ginsberg's life.]

In the following mixed review, Everett considers the poems in Cosmopolitan Greetings as candid yet inconsistent.

It took half a dozen years, and more, for people to realise that Ginsberg, in Howl, had not merely invented a written equivalent of noise, but had opened language so wide, and made it so hungry, that nothing was safe any longer from poetry. Anything could be cut loose from its attachment to logical reality, and sent roaring into a sea of associations. Ginsberg's voice, in Howl, Kaddish and Planet News is omnivorous; its genius is to include and never to exclude. That is its connection to the surreali...

[Ginsberg's] has been a spectacular career, and some of the thinking that went into making it is recorded in these "Journals"—but not enough. With all the traveling he did in these years, and the thinking he must have done to change the "shy" imitator of Williams into the astonishing poet of "Howl" and "Kaddish," Ginsberg's "Journals" do not yield episodes that reveal his development as a poet. There are trivial detai...

Ginsberg's comic bravura, like Mailer marshalling armies of the night in his three-piece suit, is wholly Jewish and self-deprecatingly assured. Ginsberg neither attempts the Western role of urban gamecock nor indulges in camp comedy. Whitman manages both … in his endless saga of self-affirmation. Yet both share the need to leap for self-transcendence in a kind of cosmic love-affair that turns, as often as not, into a comic impasse of ecstasy foiled and rebuffed…. Whitman, moreover, beli...