298
PARTISAN REVIEW
Naked Lunch,
an endless novel which will drive everybody mad"), and
in the book he alludes to a "spontaneous bop prosody." Perhaps this is
as good a characterization of his work as any.
I have spent this much time on a very short and very tiresome
book for two reasons. The first of these is involved with the fact that
Mr. Ginsberg and his circle are being given a certain amount of touting
by those who disapprove of what Horace Gregory, writing in these
pages last fall, christened "The Poetry of Suburbia."
If
it turns out
to be to anybody's profit, I shouldn't be a bit surprised if
Howl
and
its eventual ,Progeny were accorded some milder version of the cele–
bration Colin Wilson has received in England. This may not be a real
danger, however.
If
it suddenly appeared that there were no possible
worlds between suburbia and subterranea, I expect most of us would
go underground. But this is not quite yet the case, and the publicity
seems regrettable, in view of the fact (my second reason for dealing
with him here) that Allen Ginsberg has a real talent and a marvelous
ear. It shows up in some of the funniest and most grotesque lines of
"Howl," and even without knowing his profound and carefully or–
ganized earlier writing (unpublished in book form) , one might suspect
a good poet lurking behind the modish fac;ade of a frantic and
talentlos
avant-garde.
The same might be said of all the poems in
Howl
as was remarked
in a recent film, upon a doting eulogy of a heel by one of his toadies:
"Phony, but sincere." I wish that I could say at least this much for
Kenneth Rexroth's "Thou Shalt Not Kill," a shrill elegy for Dylan
Thomas in over 300 lines- by far the longest poem in his new book.
"They are murdering all the young men," it starts out, and after a
lengthy succession of more or less general indictments, gets down to
more pointed accusations. It seems, from an
ubi sunt
section replete
with conventional medieval refrain, that every dead poet of recent
memory was, in some unspecified way, a victim of murder, and that
"You''
are the culprit. But it is only in the final pages that we arrive
at the murder of Dylan Thomas and the naming of his killers:
Who killed the bright-headed bird?
You did, you son of a bitch.
You drowned him in your cocktail brain.
He fell down and died in your synthetic heart.
You killed him,
Oppenheimer the Million-Killer,
You killed him,
