What was Allen Ginsberg doing in Wales? LSD

‘Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,/ daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,/ grass shimmers green…’ The characteristic undulations of the voice of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg greet the visitor on entering Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art at the National Museum Cardiff. Bearded and mellifluous, projected to mythic proportions across a vast expanse of wall, Ginsberg is seen reading his poem ‘Wales Visitation’ on American television in 1968, telling less of visits than of visions.

What was the Blakeian, Buddhist, drug-sampling poet doing in Wales? LSD. What he’s doing dominating an exhibition so thoroughly Welsh, formed almost entirely from the Museum’s impressive national collection, is less immediately explicable. The poem makes no attempt to deny his role as a benign intruder in an unknown land, even as it conjures a visionary connection with the landscape. Nevertheless, Ginsberg acts as bardic spokesman for the exhibition (detachable headphones allow you to navigate the show with words like ‘bloomlets’ and ‘tree-nooked’ chirping in your ears), there to direct our experience of landscape as something both entirely natural and unfathomably foreign.