This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Could be the weather, could be the news, could be the state of my digestion, but right now I’m in the mood for a proper American poet-buffoon. A poet-buffoon, that is, on the American scale: a figure of swashbuckling vulnerability, ridiculous and unstoppable, friend to the dispossessed, personal frequenter of the edge of things, orating and chanting and moaning in ecstasy and getting himself arrested. I’m in the mood for an Allen Ginsberg.

So into The Atlantic’s archive I moodily go, hunting for Ginsbergiana.

There are a couple of examples, 20 years apart: a poem from the July 1986 issue titled “I Love Old Whitman So,” and a pro-weed essay from 1966, “The Gr

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