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 surrealist practice of automatic writing which is also a method of radical inclusion, a way of putting a parenthesis around the will, while the contents of the psyche pour forth, unjudged. The poetry of Howl clarifies a profound implication of spontaneous language: it is an act of love. Not only noble images, but also the crippled children of the psyche...