[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 details and, at the other extreme, some mystic musings, but Ginsberg's strength as a writer is in neither of these: it lies in his ability to deal with the whole visible world, drawing sounds and images from it, so that we see things in a new way. Here and there in the "Journals" we come across a passage that has this quality, as in the description of roosters crowing in a village: "challenging in various cockly hoarse...