In our late teens we would quote with wry approval two lines of tight-lipped weariness from 'Street Corner College', in the old Grey Walls Press selection:

                 cold stars watch us, chum
                 cold stars and the whores.

The cynical-melancholy mood was appealing, yet Kenneth Patchen seemed then no more than a turgid, bewildering writer with a certain anarchic energy—and no flair for saying anything memorable or attractive which he didn't immediately mess up. We certainly didn't guess that he would turn out to be not only an eccentric link with the Dadaism of the Twenties but also a portent: one precursor of all that inflated, meandering, soft-centred rhetoric that came in with the Beats (though he didn't have the egocentric mysticism).

To read the new Selected Poems is to mourn for the submergence of a talent by an attitude. Underneath the incoherent gestures, just salvageable from all the obscurantist digressions and limp, indulgent romanticism, is a perceptible lyric gift and a sardonic eye for the facts of American life. Sandwiched between long posturing poems whose titles take up entire pages, and pieces of raw, embarrassing sentimentality, are the haunting precisions of 'Autumn is the Crows' Time', 'The Knowledge of Old Towns' and 'Shadows and Spring Flowers', poems which actually focus. For the rest, 'all our dreams of paradise / Are dreams of an unlimited disorder / In a lawless anonymity'. Well, perhaps incoherence and absurdity is part of the point; but one can't help wishing he had more often left it to smaller talents.

Poets, like lawyers, may be divided into barristers and solicitors—those who go for all or nothing, and those content with a modest, regular income….

Mr. Kenneth Patchen belongs distinctly to the class of apocalyptic authors. It was his Albion Moonlight who said, "Think enough and you won't know anything". Against brutality and rationalism he pleads the case of love and sensuous experience. Most of his best-known poems [collected in Selected Poems] date from the period of the Second World War and the American Depression years leading up to it. His grief over the inhumanities of that era, his gestures of protest and sense of involvement, fit our mood today like a noble old fashion revived. But discipline of style or structure has never been his excellence. Whoever writes as fast as Mr. Patchen is in danger of constantly rewriting the same poem; and an unkind reader, after shifting the lines about, might end up calling this the poetry of interchangeable parts. From Mr. Patchen's Blakean aesthetic and his Whitmanesque sympathy with hoboes and union organizers the route to the voices now heard in San Francisco is clear. But the gratitude one might feel for his example or influence cannot validate verses like, "O burst of Alabama loveliness, sleeping on / In the strength of our love: O Mississippi flowing / Through our nights, a giant mother".