On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous — the blarney, stoned — but Ginsberg stole the aesthetic victory by reading ‘Wales Visitation’, a homage to William Blake. ‘White fog lifting and falling on mountain brow,’ Ginsberg intones, ‘…teeming ferns/ exquisitely swayed/ along a green crag/ glimpsed through mullioned glass in valley rain.’
‘Nice,’ Buckley nods. He lets Ginsberg read the whole poem. Ginsberg opposes the artificial imagery of power and money (‘London’s symmetrical thorned tower / & network of TV pictures flashing bearded your Self’) to the vision of the unmediated, natural Self: ‘Each flower Buddha-eye.’ After six minutes, the roots of Christianity mesh with oriental religion in a vision of physical liberation and spiritual democracy: ‘Sounds of Aleph and Aum / through forest of gristle… All Albion one.’
‘I kinda like that,’ Buckley admits.
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