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, believed in his soul. He loafed and invited it, he said. Ginsberg does not:

        Let me say beginning I don't believe
                                 in Soul
        The heart, famous heart's a bag of
                          shit I wrote 25 years ago.

Ginsberg prefers to be known as the man "Who saw Blake and abandoned God." Mind Breaths suggests spiritual afflatus and yoga exercises and consciousness-raising…. For what may seem, to the uninitiated, graffiti to decorate the walls of America...