Lane, Veronique (2019) Tristan Corbière's Amours Jaunes in Allen Ginsberg's Early Poetry. L'Esprit Créateur, 58 (4). pp. 89-103. ISSN 0014-0767
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Abstract
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Allen Ginsberg inscribed Tristan Corbière’s poetry in his own, in ways that concealed as much as they revealed. Working backwards from Ginsberg’s long cryptic allusion to Corbière in the 1986 variorum edition of “Howl,” this article offers the first intertextual reading of their poetry. Comparatively analyzing the two translations of Corbière’s Amours Jaunes that Ginsberg acquired in 1947 and 1955, it uncovers how Corbière’s prosody and meta-irony informed Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “The Lion for Real,” and shows the extent to which the French poet’s aesthetics shaped the American’s in the crucial period that preceded and followed his breakthrough with “Howl.”