Wild at Heart

In 1947 Saul Bellow published a novel called The Victim in which a derelict character named Kirby Allbee haunts another named Asa Leventhal, claiming that Leventhal is responsible for his downfall. Kirby, one of Bellow's fabled fast talkers--all feverish self-abasement and joking insult--repeatedly baits Leventhal and at one point, when Leventhal murmurs something about Walt Whitman, says to him, "Whitman? You people like Whitman? What does Whitman mean to you people?"

Who could ever have dreamed that less than a decade after the publication of this novel not only would "you people" be announcing out loud that they liked Whitman, but it would appear that they themselves had reincarnated him. The day after Allen Ginsberg's celebrated 1955 reading of "Howl" in San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram that read, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career"--the phrase that Emerson had used, writing to Whitman upon the publication, exactly a hundred years earlier, of Leaves of Grass.

Fifty years later, it is safe to say that Allen Ginsberg is the poet who, within living memory, most closely resembles Whitman. He, like Whitman, wrote an emblematic American poem that became world famous; was experienced pre-eminently as a poet of the people, at home among the democratic masses; developed a public persona to match the one in his writing--hugely free-spirited and self-promoting, an open-hearted exhibitionist. And he, again like Whitman, is remembered as a man in possession of an extraordinary sweetness that, throughout his life, welled up repeatedly to astonish the hearts of all who encountered him.

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