[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 tones as if they existed in a world of pure intuitive sound communicating to anonymous hidden familiar chickensouls from hill to hill." But there is too little of this. Instead we have his dreams, acres of them—perhaps because he had been treated by psychiatrists and was undergoing psychoanalysis. (p. 46)

As a record of Ginsberg's formative years during which he produced many good poems, the "Journals" have some factual value and must be of interest to serious readers of poetry. Ginsberg has been one of the most influential poets in America in our time.

Robert Bly once said that people disliked Ginsberg's poetry because it expressed feeling. This strikes me wrong: it wasn't the feeling they disliked but the attitudes. Ginsberg had his own brand of morality, which consisted of views directly opposed to those held by the middle class, by businessmen and politicians. And he was given to promoting his views—for example, he often spoke about the beneficial results that could follow from the use of hallucinogens. (pp. 46-7)

Yet, though Ginsberg may take himself to be a prophet, in other moods he is warm and sympathetic, at times even humorous. His "America" is one of the few truly humorous poems in the language. And there are some entertaining "political ravings" in these "Journals," including insults to some people at Columbia who did not pay sufficient attention to his poems when they first came out. As I was one of those people, I am happy to have this opportunity to say that I was wrong—not merely wrong, obtuse. I still don't care for "Howl"—Lucien Carr and Neal Cassady were not my idea of "the best minds in America"—but other poems in the volume are superb, and "Kaddish" is a masterpiece. Anything the author of these poems wrote deserves to be read, including his "Journals." (p. 47)