News at Eleven: After his death, in what amounted to

a last-page editorial in The New York Times Book Review, its editor, Charles McGrath, asserted that [Allen] Ginsberg's later poems had failed to match the genius of his early works like "Howl" and "Kaddish," the epic elegy--with its depths of anguished empathy--he wrote to commemorate his mad mother, Naomi.

This has been the perennial establishment view of Ginsberg, a tired cliché of criticism that has been routinely applied to great poets from Wordsworth to Whitman. The attitude is condescendingly wrong, as silly as the claim that Whitman's only great poem was "Song of Myself."

from The Chronicle of Higher Education: Howl's Echoes

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