Alimentary Poetics: Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg

Robert Lowell coined the famous distinction between cooked and raw poetry, but beginning with Joel Barlow’s epic treat The Hasty Pudding there is a long tradition of American poetics sustained by copious and artful use of tropes of hunger, food, and eating. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems and Lowell’s Life Studies would be emaciated beyond recognition without them. Also taking other poems into account, the essay argues that Lowell and Ginsberg did more to enrich the American alimentary poetic tradition than anyone else since T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.