In general, we applaud the sentiment behind the old admonition de mortuis nil nisi bonum: “concerning the dead, say nothing except good things.” But the outpouring of mendacious piety let loose by the death of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg last month leads us to endorse a competing principle: namely, that some basic attention ought to be paid to the truth.

It has been a long time since the truth was told about Allen Ginsberg. Catapulted to celebrity in 1956 when his poem “Howl” became the object of an obscenity suit, Ginsberg proved himself a master of calculated outrage for the next forty years. Long before his death at the age of seventy, he had managed to con a gullible cultural establishment into celebrating him as a major poetic talent and icon of sexual and political liberation. When his Selected Poems 1947–1995 was published, the well-known critic Helen Vendler produc ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase