The Last Page

“All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1855. Allen Ginsberg, who was candid about his faults and about much else, died a beloved and forgiven poet. To be sure, there are those who neither loved nor forgave him and never will. For these critics (by no means all of them conservatives), Ginsberg was one of the worst cultural vandals of the sixties. But it was interesting to read some unlikely tributes to Ginsberg, not least appreciations in National Review, written by Jeffrey Hart and Richard Brookhiser.

Ginsberg made a point now and then of accosting his spiritual foes in person, with an air of ingenuous reasonableness. Hart and Brookhiser fondly recall his attending a publishing party at the National Review offices in the 1980s—hoping, in vain, to broker a fellowship deal for Peter Orlovsky from Hart, who had ties to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Looking back, Hart and Brookhiser make it clear that they hate...