Not Yet the Great Poet : Ginsberg’s early journals meld his dream life, love life and verse : JOURNALS MID-FIFTIES (1954-58), <i> By Allen Ginsberg</i> . <i> Edited by Gordon Ball (HarperCollins: $27.50; 489 pp.</i>

Smart writers and cynical writers, writers who know that literature is only a complicated game with limited consequences, will always exist, and oddly, they’re never at a loss for words. But poets and writers who are on fire, who believe that their writing counts, they are the rare ones, and equally rare are the times that produce them.

The ‘50s, so outwardly dormant in America, now appear to have been exactly such an era for poetry, producing, like the original Big Bang, a whole chain reaction that continues to this day: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder and Burroughs among the Beats, and Ashberry, James Wright, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley and Adrienne Rich among others. Thus this collection of Ginsberg’s “Journals Mid-Fifties” provides plenty of food for thought about genius in general and about Ginsberg’s development in particular.

This compilation of 12 of Ginsberg’s notebooks follows a previous volume, “Journals Early Fifties Early Sixties,” and the fact that the “Mid-Fifties” go separated perhaps serves to indicate the importance of this period (it began with the seminal “Howl” and closed with “Kaddish”) as the center of the poet’s creative life.

As one begins these pages, the thing that is most striking is how little evidence there is of the historical world going on around the writer at that time, how very self-absorbed the writing is.

The notebooks are, first and last, most concerned with the poet’s love life and his dream life, neither in very precise ways. Almost, it seems they could have been written by any ambitious young poet-taster utterly fixated on his sexual and artistic identity, except for the surprising rigor in his exploration of prosody:

“Perhaps the concept of line is at basic root. Break up the line? into emotive or meaningful or musical complete images or abstractions or sensations--whole each, however. Except for purposeful variations on the meaning.”

It’s also clear that the young Ginsberg was reading at a voracious rate, some months nearly a book or manuscript a day, and then (astonishingly), after the splash of “Howl,” he lists a three-year plan to further his craft.

Journals are by nature private, so it may not be fair to expect them to be thrilling as well. Most of the first couple of years of this journal are no more exciting than any lovesick swain’s, and his dreams are no more interesting than anyone else’s. In March, 1955, Ginsberg notes, “Tiring of the Journal--no writing in it--promotes slop--an egocentric method.” It is precisely this method, however, and precisely these two elements--love and dream--that wind up becoming that larger-than-life figure of the poet we know today.

In truth, the brilliance of these journals is exactly the brilliant persistence of a man who will not quit until his dream life, his love life and his poems are melded into a single whole. Ginsberg’s longings begin as “I” and, four years later, they have become “we.” What begins as a sort of childish narcissism turns in the end to define the self as the world and the world as self. Blake, Whitman and the Buddha have been not only eaten but digested.

On the second page of the journal, writing from Los Angeles, the young poet writes that he “must find energy & image & act on it.” By the end, that’s just what Ginsberg has accomplished. The question he asked, coming out of a dream of Joan Burroughs, the Iphigenia of the Beat movement who had been killed by her husband, William, was, what consciousness is there in oblivion? Ginsberg’s first, precocious answer was “Howl,” written from the outside looking in. Four years later, in “Kaddish,” he’s a participant.

Despite the fact that by the beginning of these journals Ginsberg had, with “Howl,” written a great poem, he was not yet irrevocably a great poet. The poetry mixed in with the early entries seems still tentative, a trying on of hats, but the poetry at the end is consistently open, generous and triumphant--the real thing.

“I suppose I’ll wake and find myself famous,” he notes early on. These journals, like the aboriginal concept of a dream time that created the world, document that process. His first entry, in June, 1954, was written on his way north to visit his heartthrob, Neal Cassidy, and is about the men’s room of the Los Angeles Greyhound station: “Shine shave washup / Soap and towel / Who want a shave / Clean your suede / Shine your shoes.”

The last entry was written in July, 1958, from Paris:

--Began in Dying NY to sit in a room

as last nite

lying in bed my body began to rock

in silence as in a cradle

The first petty miracle of

contemplation, sign from

the body--

Look in the mind and

eat the monster there