Of Galway Kinnell's poem 'The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World', Selden Rodman wrote: 'I do not hesitate to call this the freshest, most exciting, and by far the most readable poem of a bleak decade.' John Logan called it 'a remarkable 450 line poem hard to match in American literature, drawn from contemporary life around Avenue C in New York.' James Dickey, finally, remarked that 'It is not entirely impossible that the Wave of the Future may turn out to have begun at Avenue C, or some place within walking distance' [see CLC, Vol. 1].

These judgements show more than the persistence of the American craving for the Great American Poem; they amount, I think, to a repudiation of Allen Ginsberg and the Beats as a whole. (The 'bleak decade' Rodman speaks of was among the richest in American writing this century.) Once again, the American literary establishment has failed its poets, as it had failed Crane, Lindsay, Rexroth and Patchen before. (pp. 210-11)

When we turn to Kinnell's poem, what do we in fact find? Something 'drawn from' the life around Avenue C in New York indeed…. Kinnell sees New York and its exotic Jews much as a tourist might savour Amsterdam's fleamarket or London's Petticoat Lane:

  In sunlight on the Avenue
  The Jew rocks along in a black fur shtraimel,
  Black robe, black knickers, black knee-stockings,
  Black shoes. His beard like a sod-bottom
  Hides the place where he wears no tie.
  A dozen children troop after him, barbels flying,
  In skullcaps. They are Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah,
     Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Napthali, Gad,
     Asher….

There seems more than a suspicion that Kinnell is using people here, these dramatically poor Jews whose exotic headgear and outlandish names have to be pointed out.

      The Downtown Talmud Torah
      Blosztein's Cutrate Bakery
      Areceba Panataria Hispano
      Peanuts Dried Fruit Nuts & Canned Goods
      Productos Tropicales
      Appetizing Herring Candies Nuts
      Nathan Kugler Chicken Store Fresh Killed Daily
      Little Rose Restaurant….

This whole passage (there is as much again in the same vein as I have quoted) fails in its purpose to evoke the 'rich' life of the neighbourhood; it is a jumble of assorted names; rhythm has vanished, and the phenomena and names named merely clutter what they are meant to illumine. Poetry is a viciously exacting art: we apprehend as irrelevance not any technical offence against a norm of economy, but the poet's fundamental lack of engagement in the subject. Kinnell has tried to conjure up a ghetto here, in the way that Tadeusz Rozewicz conjures Warsaw, William Saroyan Chicago, or Izaac Babel Odessa. The poet here simply has not 'seen' or appropriated these things, because he has not loved them enough. He is exploiting them, even if he is doing it 'sincerely', and the result is offensive, especially when he comes to refer to the Nazi concentration camps.

The point is reinforced when we come to consider what Kinnell can do well, what he does see, as he has not seen these Jews in their historical agony. For Kinnell specializes, inevitably, in bits of observation 'well done' in the mid-century manner, though somewhat after the manner of Crane's 'The Tunnel'…. 'A propane- / gassed bus makes its way with big, airy sighs.'… and 'a crate of lemons discharges lights like a battery'. Such effects are competent in themselves, but they are certainly not welded by a presiding consciousness, or made to play their part in a scenario of values. They sacrifice what vitality they might have had to the demands of an unrewarding context.

What this means is that Kinnell—at this stage, at least—has no real voice or creative personality. The verse is free of rhetoric, it eschews the 'poetic' as studiously as the Pre-Raphaelites sought it, and seems to think that in doing so it has done its job. But in fact no matter how rhetorical (Milton) or hieratic (Eliot) it may be, verse can only live through 'voice', and Kinnell has none to offer. It has a certain egotism in place of the reserve of the older academic—this much has been gained. So what? The successes in Kinnell's later poetry are in the Eberhart neo-Platonist vein. An example is the last poem of the sequence 'Flower Herding on the Mountain'…. The piece as a whole is one of Kinnell's most successful, though it is characteristic of his manner that one is constantly reminded of other poets—of Levertov here and her 'almost silent / ripping apart of giant sheets / of cellophane'. No-one of course has a monopoly on the word 'cellophane', but there is a disturbing similarity in the two poets' exploitation of its transcendental possibilities. Levertov's angle on the transcendental is altogether more natural, human and involved than Kinnell's. Kinnell's metaphysicality reminds one rather of René Char…. As in Eberhart's 'The Groundhog', the phenomenal flower (hog) [in Char's 'Poème pulvérisé'] is conceived in its Platonic essence as it burns its way to purity. Behind this way of thinking is the late symbolist tradition: the Valéry of 'Cimetière Marin' and Valéry's French successors, Supervielle and Char himself. Levertov, we recall, included a version of a Supervielle poem ('A Horse Grazing') in her collection, The Jacob's Ladder. Thus, Kinnell's poem takes its place in a complex enough tradition, but one which always founded its validity upon the poet's being able to draw the Platonist themes into direct relationship with himself and his own destiny. Valéry's great poem comes to a climax in the pained reflection, 'Il faut tenter de vivre'; Levertov—humorously, half-mockingly—catches herself out: 'The authentic! I said rising from the toilet-seat'. And the whole sequence ('Matins') turns upon the poet's need to redeem from banality a life which at all times threatens to subordinate the identity of the poet within that of the housewife.

It is this kind of relevance that Kinnell's verse characteristically lacks, and the reason is not so much that he hasn't thought about it or doesn't care enough, as that he has not really got an identity or a 'destiny' to relate it to. In this he is typical of a great majority of contemporary American writers.

In 'The Supper After the Last', the egotism referred to above lends a certain weight to the poem: the Valéry-ian platonism is there, but the sexual encounter the poem celebrates gives it body…. It is worth noting that such effects are very much Kinnell's own: eclectic as he is, he has his own way with certain physical transformations and he can show the physical turning into the immaterial as few modern poets have.

But the metaphysics nevertheless seem confused…. Mr Kinnell hardly endears himself to us by the tone with which he casts himself as Saviour, 'wild man' etc. The whole poem is too evasive to make it easy to attribute identities and roles, but the impression is of a heavy egotism—the speaker/saviour/Kinnell figure is clearly meant to be admired if not revered, and it is a tone we don't easily accept from anybody. Certainly nothing of the guru's authority comes through here, and to succeed the poem badly needed something like it.

Nevertheless, 'The Supper After the Last' is one of the best poems in Poems of Night, and the eclecticism so characteristic of the poet is comparatively well absorbed. Crane and Frost are relevant forbears. But one thinks of many others as one works through the volume—Shelley, James Joyce (viz. the ubiquitous Bloom figure in section II of 'The Avenue C'), the English transcendentalists—à bien d'autres encore! Every poet needs his precursors and heroes, and an intelligent recognition and selection of them are a significant part of any young poet's maturation. But all too often Kinnell fails to absorb his influences: he will 'do over', say, Levertov, or Shelley (witness the moon 'crazed with too much child-bearing' in Kinnell's 'Freedom, New Hampshire—3') or Hart Crane (witness the liberal borrowings from 'Harbour Dawn' in Kinnell's 'The River That is East') much as he consciously 'does over' Robert Frost in 'For Robert Frost'.

What emerges is the care to get the description right which is so typical of mid-twentieth-century verse on both sides of the Atlantic, what we see in Richard Wilbur in America or in Geoffrey Hill in England. This is one of the more distressing symptoms of mid-century malaise—a copying of externals, after the methods of the older masters, without any of the significance-conferring transcendentalism of those masters. In Kinnell's case, it is again 'The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World' which best demonstrates the point. At the end of the poem Kinnell strives after movement, movement springing from conviction and imparting authority:

       Listen! the swish of the blood,
       The sirens down the bloodpaths of the night,
       Bone tapping the bone, nerve-nets
       Singing under the breath of sleep—

So far so good: it is a distinguished passage, but one needing to lead somewhere for its implications to be redeemed. Kinnell needs to open up America here. And he tries to do so:

          We scattered over the lonely seaways,
          Over the lonely deserts did we run,
          In dark lanes we did hide ourselves….

Presumably what is striven after here is something of that camaraderie of the night so warmly evoked in 'HOWL'. The mention of Ginsberg's poem—which gets steadily more remarkable as we withdraw from it in time—is enough to demolish the card-house Kinnell has been with some skill putting together. The burning conviction of having lived a confused but spiritually rewarding life that generates the tension and drive of 'HOWL' has given way to a slightly self-congratulatory in-group feeling: 'We scattered over the lonely seaways….' Reading 'HOWL', an intelligent square ought to feel stopped in his tracks; reading Kinnell's poem, he could be excused for shrugging, 'So what?' (pp. 212-16)

Kinnell's poet y shows that it is possible to satisfy a good many of the accepted critical criteria without really touching the nerve of human feeling, and that there is a huge difference between ease of movement and voice, between absence of rhetoric and the communication of a human personality. It is superficially impressive and occasionally it is impressive without being superficial, but its absence of any real creative personality, of any deeper spiritual orientation, is typical of much American poetry of its time. (p. 217)