"I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that"
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Dickey’s complaint isn’t really about Allen Ginsberg so much as it’s about gatekeeping in an age when the gates were coming off. Calling poetry a “craft that I honor and live by” frames the argument as a defense of labor: meters learned, images chiseled, revision endured. In that light, Ginsberg becomes a symbol of a different poetic economy - one where confession, spontaneity, and performance can read like shortcuts to someone trained in formal rigor.
The sharpest move is Dickey’s use of “mean.” He’s not accusing Ginsberg of making poetry worse; he’s accusing him of lowering the average, redefining the baseline of what qualifies. That’s why the alleged harm is social, not aesthetic: it “enables” others. The target is the knock-on effect, the way a canonical rebel can license an army of imitators who take the rebellion without the talent, the urgency, or the intellectual pressure behind it.
Subtextually, Dickey is also defending a hierarchy of taste at the exact moment it was being challenged by Beat celebrity, mass media attention, and a broader 1960s suspicion of expertise. His phrasing betrays anxiety about legitimacy: if poetry can be claimed by “the most dubious practitioners,” then the identity of “poet” stops being an earned title and starts being a self-assigned brand.
Context matters: Dickey came up in a mid-century literary culture where mastery and seriousness were policed, while Ginsberg helped make poetry public, loud, and scandalously accessible. Dickey’s jab is less an objective verdict than a cultural skirmish over who gets to define art when the audience is expanding.
The sharpest move is Dickey’s use of “mean.” He’s not accusing Ginsberg of making poetry worse; he’s accusing him of lowering the average, redefining the baseline of what qualifies. That’s why the alleged harm is social, not aesthetic: it “enables” others. The target is the knock-on effect, the way a canonical rebel can license an army of imitators who take the rebellion without the talent, the urgency, or the intellectual pressure behind it.
Subtextually, Dickey is also defending a hierarchy of taste at the exact moment it was being challenged by Beat celebrity, mass media attention, and a broader 1960s suspicion of expertise. His phrasing betrays anxiety about legitimacy: if poetry can be claimed by “the most dubious practitioners,” then the identity of “poet” stops being an earned title and starts being a self-assigned brand.
Context matters: Dickey came up in a mid-century literary culture where mastery and seriousness were policed, while Ginsberg helped make poetry public, loud, and scandalously accessible. Dickey’s jab is less an objective verdict than a cultural skirmish over who gets to define art when the audience is expanding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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