SOURCE: "Allen Ginsberg," in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, edited by Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty, St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 199-217.

[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.]

Allen Ginsberg nowadays looks like a successful Jewish dentist since he cut his hair and beard and donned suit and tie at the instigation of his Guru Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. As the half-title page of his Collected Poems notes, he is a 'Member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute' and he describes himself gleefully in an interview with Jim Burns as 'a most respectable figure'. A founder member of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, circa 1944, Ginsberg is still best known...