"I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last"
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There is a cool, almost surgical generosity in Fiedler's praise: he hands Ginsberg the one thing a poet ultimately wants - endurance - while denying him the comforting myth of consistent mastery. The barb lands in the clause "despite the fact", which frames admiration as a hard-won concession rather than a fan's reflex. Fiedler isn't just judging poems; he's judging a temperament. Ginsberg, in this view, writes with a kind of manic openness that produces both revelation and sprawl, and he either can't or won't police the boundary.
The line about not knowing "when he is being good and when he is bad" reads like a critique of Beat authenticity itself. The Beats sold immediacy as virtue: first thought, best thought; confession as craft. Fiedler, a mid-century critic wary of literary movements turning into lifestyle brands, punctures that romance. He implies that Ginsberg's internal taste-maker is unreliable - that the poet's own sense of what counts as art is compromised by zeal, ego, or sheer velocity.
Then comes the pivot: "But he will last, or at least those poems will last". It's a backhanded coronation. Fiedler separates the enduring artifact from the fallible maker, as if to say history will do the editing Ginsberg won't. It also acknowledges a cultural fact: Ginsberg's best work doesn't merely succeed aesthetically; it captures a social voltage - postwar dread, erotic candor, anti-authoritarian hunger - in a way that's hard to unwrite. Fiedler bets on the poems as documents of pressure, not on the poet as a reliable craftsman.
The line about not knowing "when he is being good and when he is bad" reads like a critique of Beat authenticity itself. The Beats sold immediacy as virtue: first thought, best thought; confession as craft. Fiedler, a mid-century critic wary of literary movements turning into lifestyle brands, punctures that romance. He implies that Ginsberg's internal taste-maker is unreliable - that the poet's own sense of what counts as art is compromised by zeal, ego, or sheer velocity.
Then comes the pivot: "But he will last, or at least those poems will last". It's a backhanded coronation. Fiedler separates the enduring artifact from the fallible maker, as if to say history will do the editing Ginsberg won't. It also acknowledges a cultural fact: Ginsberg's best work doesn't merely succeed aesthetically; it captures a social voltage - postwar dread, erotic candor, anti-authoritarian hunger - in a way that's hard to unwrite. Fiedler bets on the poems as documents of pressure, not on the poet as a reliable craftsman.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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