Dead Beat in Postwar America: Ginsberg, the Late Romantic
Prof. dr. Eduard VLAD
Universitatea ,,Ovidius” Constanţa
Shelley’s definition of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (A Defence
of Poetry) seems to have been taken very seriously by the mature Ginsberg, whom Helen Vendler
sees as “an original voice in American poetry, helping to change public consciousness, as he
justifiably says, ‘from provincial wartime nationalist-history-bound egoic myopia to panoramic
awareness of planet news…’”1 Although seen as a very original figure, Ginsberg naturally has to
acknowledge a number of circumstances and people that influenced his artistic development. In
terms of poetic language and vision the major American influence on Ginsberg appears to be, in
addition to Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams.
Paterson, New Jersey, is a coordinate of more than one outstanding literary career. It is both the
place where William Carlos Williams spent most of his mature life and the one which supplied the
name of the sequence of poems that Ginsberg would come to admire. Allen, born in Newark, close
to New York City, in 1926, spent his childhood and adolescence in Williams’ city. The illustrious
precursor, although a canonical Modernist, was also a promoter of avant-garde poetry that was
trying to break away with the already oppressive Modernist tradition, emerging “as a sort of patron
saint of the reaction against ‘modernist’ aesthetics that occurred in the 1950s and the 1960s” 2 It is
with a letter of introduction from Williams to Kenneth Rexroth, the leading literary figure of San
Francisco, that Allen Ginsberg went west in 1954 and – the rest is (literary) history, which has to
accommodate … his story (Ginsberg’s) as well.
Ginsberg’s explorations of the creative capabilities of madness, its link with the divine, place him
within a distinct Romantic tradition, but they are largely based on his family experience. Allen was
born into a Jewish family, the son of Louis, a schoolteacher and poet, and Naomi, a Communist
activist born in Russia. Although one would expect the father poet to have influenced Allen, it is to
his mother that he appears to acknowledge his indebtedness as an emerging poet, which he later
expresses in his memorable Kaddish (1959), dedicated to the memory of Naomi. The mother’s ever
more serious fits of insanity led to her permanent institutionalization, shock therapy ultimately
followed by lobotomy. It is probably her visionary insanity that Ginsberg himself appears to try to
cope with in his own artistic life, although one may see it as a mask he is making up.
In addition to Shelley, the American poet also admits a certain indebtedness to the British
Romantic William Blake. It is to the latter that he initially pledges allegiance as a visionary and as a
rebel. One of Ginsberg’s most memorable high school moments was an enthusiastic reading of
Blake by his English teacher. Later on, while a student at Columbia University in 1948,
Ginsbergclaims to have had an “auditory vision” of William Blake reciting two of his poems (“Ah!
Sunflower” and “The Sick Rose”). Ginsberg’s last terrestrial act will also link him to Blake in a
final coincidence: both poets died at 71. We have come to expect the Romantics, Beats, and
Confessionals to die relatively young: like Blake, Ginsberg will contradict this stereotype.
1
Helen Vendler. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988,
p. 262.
2
Carl Rapp. William Carlos Williams and Romantic Idealism. Hanover & London: University Press of New England,
1984, p.5.
The future poet’s life at Columbia University was far from monotonous. Expelled from it in 1945,
his sophomore year, for obscene graffiti scrawled on his dormitory window, Ginsberg eventually
managed to graduate from it in 1948. Friends and professors alike exerted an important influence on
his subsequent artistic career. The bohemian friends (Kerouac, Burroughs) provided the entourage
that came to be associated with the Beat movement.
The company he kept, however, got him into trouble soon after graduation. Herbert Huncke had
been storing stolen goods in Ginsberg’s apartment, which he would sell to buy the drugs he had
become dependent on. After the police searched his dwelling, Ginsberg was arrested and stood trial
for complicity. On the advice of his university professors, he pleaded insanity and was sent for eight
months to ‘the cuckoo’s nest’ – the Columbia Psychiatric Institute – instead of the jail. It is while
being institutionalized that he met Carl Solomon, the enlightened madman to whom he will dedicate
his best known poem, “Howl.”
Released from the mental hospital, Ginsberg took a number of odd jobs and became for a short
while a successful market researcher in San Francisco. Leaving the “respectable” life of an
employee for good, Ginsberg mixed with the poets that came to be known as the San Francisco
Poetry Renaissance: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure.
Ginsberg is seen as the key figure that links the two closely related literary groups, the New York
Beats and the West Coast poets of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Both groups rebelled
against social conformity, political repression and the prevailing materialism of the postwar age,
fuelled by America’s booming economy and accompanying affluence. Rejecting conformism and
satisfaction with standardization, deploring the influence of mechanization, like the Romantics
before them, they stressed once more the importance of individual experience. Pushing Rimbaud’s
“bateau ivre”(“the drunken ship”) to still unchartered and unmapped high seas, they used their
dereglement de tous les sens to reach new heights of mystical experience. Their journey of initiation
involved drug abuse, alcohol, free sex, but also the beatific realms of Zen Buddhism. Unlike other
poets in the New York area, considered to belong to the so-called “New York School” (Frank
O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch), Ginsberg and the Beats enthusiastically went for primitive
mythologies. According to David Perkins, Ginsberg would “pray to virtually every god, goddess,
spirit, or spiritual power the human mind has conceived”3.
The Beats attracted a lot of attention in 1957 with the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s long
poem “Howl” and Kerouac’s novel On the Road. However, the most significant moment in
Ginsberg’s artistic career and the central event of the West Coast literary life appears to have taken
place a little earlier, during the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. It
was then that Ginsberg gave the first reading of his “Howl,” which he had completed a couple of
months before. The response of the audience was tremendous. Ginsberg soon became a cult figure,
Howl and Other Poems being soon published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights.
“Howl” is an outstanding illustration of poetry as performance. In its attempt to suggest spontaneity
and to express intensity of feeling it also ushers in a new Romantic revival. It combines visionary
insight with the “naked” confession and detailed exploration of squalid reality. It is a remarkable
experiment and at the same time a revival of Walt Whitman’s long line with its comprehensive
catalogs and juxtapositions of aspects of contemporary America. It uses syntactic parallelism and
repetitions to weave a broad, all-encompassing poetic web. Significantly, Ginsberg’s poem was
created exactly one hundred years after Whitman’s publication of his major work, Leaves of Grass.
“Howl”’s first, longest and most important section appears to lament “the best minds of Ginsberg’s
generation.” Naturally, these are not brilliant physicists, physicians or engineers of America’s
“brave new world,” but members of what will be known as “the Beat generation,” a collection of
nonconformist and visionary dreamers: drug addicts, homosexuals, tramps “on the road” across the
3
D. Perkins. A History of Modern Poetry. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
p. 530.
United States. They are the Beat version of the Romantic disinherited, conjured up in a voice that
alternately highly praises and slightly mocks them.
The long catalog of their predicament and preoccupations reminds the reader of some of the
experiences that Ginsberg himself underwent: the expulsion from university, his institutionalization
and imprisonment, his vision of Blake, his familiarity with mystical texts, the wandering across
America, to Mexico, drug addiction, life in squalid lodgings. In addition to Ginsberg himself, Carl
Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated, Neil Cassady (N.C.), the “super-Beat” that Kerouac
himself captured in On the Road (as Dean Moriarty) looms large: “secret hero of these poems,
cocksman and Adonis of Denver.” Ginsberg will “memorialize” in stark detail his love-(sex)-atfirst-sight affair with Cassady in “Many Loves,” a Whitmanian (but much more outspoken) episode
of “manly attachment.”
The second part features an interrogation and a long series of exclamations in which the poet defies
Moloch, the sphinx of cement and aluminum, whose mind is pure machinery, the incomprehensible
prison, the soulless jailhouse, oil, stone, electricity, banks, skyscrapers. The whole of America
appears to worship the gods of materialism (“Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets
like endless Jehovahs!”). The poet deplores his own alienation at the hands of the omnipotent
monster: “Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a
body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!” This happens in the context in which
even the “enlightened visionaries” that he commemorates “broke their backs lifting Moloch to
Heaven.”
In the third section the poet asserts his solidarity with Carl Solomon, still confined to his ward in the
Rockland mental hospital. There are many things that bind the two: they are both mad (although
Carl is a little madder), they are both “great writers on the same dreadful typewriter,” poetes
maudits dealing with horrifying experiences. In the Introduction to Howl, William Carlos Williams
commends Ginsberg for his poete maudit visionary power and for the all-inclusive scope of his
poetic range: “Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This
poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem.
He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt”4 .
Such authoritative critical opinions as Williams’ above must have played an important part in the
unfolding of the obscenity trial that the publication of Howl led to. The book published by
Ferlinghetti in 1956 was seized by the police, and the publishers were arrested. The trial that ensued
ended in triumph for Ginsberg & Comp. Like Byron’s “Childe Harold…,” “Howl” made its author
famous almost over night. The Beats and the beatniks now had a strong manifesto. This is how
Ginsberg’s biographer Barry Miles describes the poet’s attitude to public perceptions of the Beat
phenomenon in the subsequent years:
He [Ginsberg] took pains to show the difference between the Beat Generation, with its philosophy
of love and tenderness, and the beatniks, who were mostly weekend bohemians out for a good time,
but the press generally blurred the distinction, and the public perception was that Allen was the
progenitor of all the bearded young men who wandered around Greenwich Village in handmade
leather sandals, carrying bongos and a bottle of Chianti. Certainly they all had a copy of Howl in
their jeans pockets 5.
If “Howl” defines Ginsberg in relation to Carl Solomon and “the best minds of his generation,” “A
Supermarket in California” brings the father figure of “childless, lonely old grubber” Walt Whitman
to the foreground. The poet appears to engage in a conversation with his mentor while roaming the
streets, while, “shopping for images,” he enters a supermarket. He delights in the common things
and people he sees there and dreams of Whitman’s enumerations, a distinct feature that he himself
employs in his poem. “A Supermarket…” is as densely packed with things and matter as “Howl,”
4
5
A. Ginsberg. Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York: Harper & Row, 1984, pp.811-812.
B. Miles. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989, pp.248-249.
although much shorter. It is, as Ginsbeg later titled his subsequent collection of poems, a “reality
sandwich.”
Garcia Lorca himself seems to be lost in the large store, much to the (feigned) surprise of the
American poet. Probably like Lorca and Ginsberg, Whitman furtively ogles the grocery boys.
Ginsberg and Whitman walk along the aisles, tasting and enjoying every delicacy with their eyes
only, and therefore not having to pay for their image shopping. They are at the same time together
and solitary, lost in a world of consumerism toward which they appear to entertain an ambivalent
attitude. Their huge selves may contain multitudes, as Whitman says; however, adopting the
complex Romantic stance, they combine a certain solipsism with a desire to immerse themselves in
the vast reality around them. The mild touch of irony and self-irony present in the poem again
evokes a distinct Whitmanesque element, its wide tonal range including both reverence and farcical
(self-)mockery, a characteristic which was also conspicuous in “Howl.” As a whole, the poem pays
tribute to the illustrious forerunner, a poet of reality and direct experience.
If there is some clowning and a mixture of tragic and comic elements in “Howl,” as well as traces of
irony and self-irony in “A Supermarket,” “Sunflower Sutra” is one of the first poems by Ginsberg
actuated by a “purer” poetic vision. It is a “sutra” recounting a moment of visionary illumination,
with its implicit condemnation of the dehumanizing world of “the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.”
In the company of Kerouac, the speaker, ostensively Ginsberg, walks by the side of a huge and
grimy Southern Pacific locomotive, trying to look at the sunset beyond the desolate landscape of
rusted iron. Urged by Kerouac, the speaker catches sight of “A dead gray shadow against the sky,
big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust” – his first glimpse of a Blakean
sunflower. The apparition is “bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden
locomotives in its eye,” like the engine next to it, an “unholy battered old thing.”
The reader gradually comes to put together in the same image the flower and the locomotive, while
the speaker is investigating its uncertain essence: “when did you forget you were a flower? … when
did you … decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? … the specter and shade of a once
powerful mad American locomotive?” Reaching a moment of visionary insight, Ginsberg identifies
himself with what he is contemplating, delivering a sermon to his, Kerouac’s, and everybody’s soul:
“We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all
golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed…”
Like Frank O’Hara, to whom “My Sad Self”(Reality Sandwiches) is dedicated, Ginsberg defines
himself (or rather, his sad self) in relation to New York, the city where he spent some of his
formative years. Occasionally, he goes to the top of the RCA Building in Manhattan and looks
around, at “his world.” Like in “A Supermarket…,” it is difficult to see in the poet (or the speaker,
at least) the later prophet and guru addressing the multitudes. “His world” is made up of “buildings,
streets I’ve done feats in,/ lofts, beds, coldwater flats.” His “sad self” appears to be alienated,
watching things at a distance, unable to establish contact, the “ant cars, little yellow taxis,
men/walking the size of specks of wood.”
He descends, roams the sidewalks, stares bemused and lost in thought, sarcastically listens, after
reaching home and while cooking supper, “the romantic war news on the radio.” The speaker then
sees himself walking “in the timeless sadness of existence,” windows he goes past reflecting his
“own face streaked with tears.” He has no desire, which is the right thing for a budding Buddhist,
but he quickly and bathetically adds after a dash, “- for bonbons.” He is confused by the human
show around him, and by “all these streets leading/ so crosswise…/ … avenues/ stalked by high
buildings or crusted into slums…”
All this leads to a vision of Nothingness, to “this graveyard/ this stillness/ on deathbed or mountain/
once seen/ never regained or desired/ in the mind to come/ where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must
disappear.” While in “A Supermarket” the poet appeared to delight to a certain extent in the
“reality sandwiches” around him, in “My Sad Self” the sight of the tumult of the city appears to
lead to a solitary contemplation of Nirvana.
“Kaddish” was completed toward the end of 1958, but the lengthy job of revising the text began
early in 1959, three years after Allen’s mother’s death. The dating at the end of the poem is precise:
Paris, December 1957 – New York, 1959. The circumstances under which “Kaddish” was first
committed to paper, not in France, but in America, are mentioned in the poem, Barry Miles’s
biography of Ginsberg completing the picture6. The poet stayed all through the night in the
apartment of Putterman, a Jewish friend in Manhattan, New York. The two listened to jazz (Ray
Charles) and got high on drugs.
After reciting excerpts from Shelley’s “Adonais,” Ginsberg told his friend the sad story of his
mother: her insanity, her death, the burial at which Naomi had been denied the Kaddish, the Jewish
prayer for the dead. Somewhat to compensate for the funeral without the Kaddish, Putterman
produced a book of Jewish ritual and read fragments of the Kaddish. With the fresh memory of
these fragments resonating in his mind and his recollections of his departed mother haunting his
long walk back home across Greenwich Village, Manhattan, Ginsberg determined to write his own
“Kaddish.”
The dating of the poem stresses the long process of its composition, the effort and craft that went
into it. The New York story, on the other hand, supports the Romantic myth of poetic spontaneity:
Ginsberg heard Putterman reading the Jewish Kaddish and, on the spur of the moment, created his
own: “Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day.”
The poem is two and a half times as long as “Howl,” and uses the same long lines, repetitions and
parallelisms. It has five parts (six, considering the “Hymmnn” between parts II and III as an
independent section), of which the first two are considerably longer (part II by far the longest of all
sections). The complete title gives an account of the poem’s form and substance: “Kaddish: Proem,
Narrative, Hymmnn, Litany and Fugue.”
The first part (the proem is a sort of prelude) shows the speaker addressing Naomi: the mother is
gone now, and the poet is roaming the streets of New York, where she walked 50 years before, a
young immigrant from Russia, “eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America.” Naomi is past
suffering now, and the son is trying to understand some of her mysteries and the mysteries of “that
Dark,” “that God,” “the Void.” Ginsberg is fascinated by that “Forever” that all humanity is bound
for, “like Emily Dickinson’s horses – headed to the End.” This first section ends with the poet now
apparently addressing an obscure deity one might initially take for God, and who is shrouded in the
garments of the Void: “Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in
death […] Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless
Eternity.” Although the poet is “unmarried,” “hymnless,” “Heavenless,” and “ headless in
blisshood,” he is shaping a “Psalm,” “to praise Thee – But Death,” to express “the end, the
redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All.” Kaddish shows Allen
and his mother’s eventual journey; the two are headed for “God’s perfect Darkness.” Nevertheless,
the poem as both expression and reaction to transience is apparently trying to momentarily stop
Death’s phantoms.
Naomi’s history of paranoia, the woman’s successive hospitalizations involving electric shock
treatment and eventual lobotomy, the story of her husband, sister, sons and other relatives lend a
marked narrative dimension to the second section of the poem, an attempt made by the speaker to
piece together a number of scenes, to find, as Polonius would say, “method in her madness.” In
dealing with his mother’s tormented existence, Ginsberg is beginning to consider Zen Buddhism,
which claims that suffering is the basis of existence. Ginsberg finds in Naomi’s last letter, which he
received two days after her death, “Strange Prophecies anew”: “The key is in the window, […] – I
6
B. Miles. Op.cit., pp. 10-11.
have the key – Get married Allen don’t take drugs – the key is in the sunlight in the window. Love,
your mother.”
Unlike the Jewish Kaddish which, although performed at funerals, is basically a hymn of praise
addressed to God, Ginsberg’s poem is basically concerned with Naomi’s narrative of intense
suffering. His Hymmnn, the second shortest of the parts, initially appears to be dedicated to God:
“In the world which He has created according to his will Blessed Praised Magnified Lauded Exalted
the Name of the Holy One Blessed is He!” Right away, God, center and stability, is blessed in a
number of ‘marginal’ contexts dear to the Beats: “In the madhouse Blessed is He! … Blessed be He
in homosexuality! Blessed be He in paranoia!” Most of this short section of the poem, between
parts II and III, is dedicated to Naomi, though: “Blessed be you Naomi in tears! … in fears! … in
sickness! …in Death!” The next and final move is to bless …death itself: “Blessed be Death on us
All!”
Part III, the lament, also seems to describe the speaker’s endeavour to remember and make sense of
Naomi’s lifelong madness and of her final message, “The key is in the sunlight at the window in the
bars the key is in the sunlight.” The woman has experienced suffering but has finally found
enlightenment, and she is sharing her discovery with her son.
The next part is a Litany, but, surprisingly, the prayer is addressed to Naomi as well, a succession of
questions (“what have I left out … what have I forgotten…”), descriptions of her, farewells. Finally,
her death is seen as a sort of triumph, being “full of Flowers.”
The fifth and final part is a Fugue, in which the shrieks of the crows hovering over the graves in
Long Island alternate with invocations of God, who is the “great Eye that stares on All” and
“Grinder of giant Beyonds.” Puzzlingly enough, Ginsberg’s God does not “see,” but “stares”( in
surprise?), He is not “the Creator,” but a “Grinder.”
“Kaddish” turns out to be not an invocation of God on the occasion of Allen’s mother’s death, but
an expression of the speaker’s fascination with suffering and death. It is an original combination,
witnessing the creation of a complex poetic self, adapting and accommodating the Jewish Kaddish,
Romantic intensity and Buddhist resignation, the last two apparently incongruous. It is not
surprising that the poet will undertake to redefine his attitude to Providence under new, un-Jewish
and un-Christian auspices, in the years to come.
Following Kerouac’s method of spontaneous writing, Ginsberg himself tries his hand at
spontaneous poetry; he will often dictate whatever occurs to him into a tape recorder during his trips
across America, often with very dubious effects. “America” is one of the successful “spontaneous”
pieces.
The speaker is addressing, scolding, questioning the U.S. Apparently he has given his country
everything: he has only got $ 2.27 on January 17, 1956, when he is writing the poem. He is
contradicting himself immediately afterward: “I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind (yet
he is busy composing it).” America is told to be angelic, to take off its clothes, to look at itself
“through the grave,” to be worthy of its million Trotskyites, and … to send its eggs to India. Fed up
with the country’s “insane demands,” he sensibly wants to know “When can I go into the
supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” The speaker soon gets the idea that he is
America and that he is talking to himself again. He first pretends to speak in the country’s name,
assessing its national resources, then expresses the ambition “to be President despite the fact that
I’m a Catholic.” He then addresses America again from a Leftist perspective. A little later, the voice
changes, this time apparently expressing the paranoid fears of the McCarthy age in broken English:
“The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out
our garages./ Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest…” The speaker clarifies
the nonsensical voice he has adopted: “this is the impression I get from looking in the television
set.” Ginsberg has no intention to play the hero, he is fully aware of his limitations: It’s true I don’t
want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic
anyway.” Nevertheless, he is boldly announcing his willingness to contribute to the common good
from his marginal position: “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
A famous and controversial figure in the 1960s, Ginsberg plays an important role in the
counterculture then emerging. His “sad self” is turning into an apparently extroverted personality,
able to electrify large audiences, capable of bringing people together (the famous reconciliation
between the California hippies and Hell’s Angels being one of the most striking examples),
antagonizing authorities even in countries one expects Ginsberg to feel more at home in (Cuba,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, The Soviet Union, Israel). He rallies the Beats, beatniks and the Beatles
(whom he meets in England), he is admired by Bob Dylan. His bearded, “flower power” (a phrase
he had coined, and which gained universal currency) self is the most conspicuous presence during
the demonstrations and marches against the Vietnam war.
His howl of difference, flaunting his homosexuality and his LSD indulgence, is supposed to become
part of his artistic personality, his biography, like that of the Romantics before him, turning into an
essential element of his poetic self. Not in the opinion of the Russian poet Yevtushenko, recorded in
Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg: “I respect you as a great man, a great poet, but these two
subjects, homosexuality and narcotics, are not known to me, and I feel they are juvenile
preoccupations … It only disturbs my impression of you” 7.
Like the Romantics, he revives the ode, this time dedicating his best-known one to … Plutonium!
The element stands for death through devastating nuclear explosions, a new cruel god “named for
Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus/ whose chtonic ore fathers this madma-teared Lord
of Hades.” One soon realizes that the “Plutonian Ode” is not dedicated to the destructive element,
but to “Poets and Orators to come,” as well as to Whitman, the Congress, the American people, to
“present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers, you O master of the Diamond Arts…,” who are
urged to destroy the lethal threat by the power of their “ordinary mind and body speech.”
Ginsberg has been admired by many and derided by some (among whom the most note-worthy is
Norman Podhoretz), but his position seems firmly secure in the cultural history of post-war
America. His exacerbated outbursts of defiant honesty may largely be seen as acts of courage, as
attempts to promote the cause of the underdog and of the marginalized. Some people will see
Ginsberg’s behavior, to a considerable extent, an expression and a result of the long process of
democratization which is part and parcel of the American story.
References:
Ginsberg, A. Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Miles, B. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Perkins, D. A History of Modern Poetry. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1987.
Rapp, C. William Carlos Williams and Romantic Idealism. Hanover & London: University Press of
New England, 1984.
Vendler, H. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988.
7
B. Miles. Op.cit., pp. 358.