Obituaries and memorial services marking the death of Allen Ginsberg suggest something of the strength of his idea that poetry can make things happen. The country's poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, wrote that Ginsberg's "genius for public life should not obscure his genius as an artist or his study of his art," but it is precisely his understanding of the interconnection between public life and art that accounts for his success. California historian David Reid is editor of "Sex, Death and God in L.A." and is at work on "The Brazen Age: 1944-1950."

SAN FRANCISCO -- Last Sunday, more than two weeks after the death of Allen Ginsberg, a visitor to Temple Emanu-el would pass a man floating oranges and lotuses in the courtyard fountain, then enter the temple where a multitude overflowing the aisles listened to the elegy.

The photographs accompanying the obituaries showed a fair-sized crowd, too. There is the skinny, clean-shaven, 1950s San Francisco coffeehouse rebel who wrote "Howl." The portly, bearded, brazen homosexual of the 1960s, chanting, globe-trotting, anti-war demonstrating. Then the Tibetan-Buddhist devout international culture hero advertising Gap khakis on billboards. And the tidy, ironical professor who got a million dollars for his papers from Stanford University.

This ability to "contain multitudes," as Whitman boasted, tells us something about why he left such a mark -- and why poetry still seems to matter so much to us.

The New York Times put him on page one, respectfully , "Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet of Beat Generation, Dies at 70." While mistaken on some details (not even hipsters tripped on "mind-altering drugs like LSD" in the 1940s) -- the obituary correctly traced the origins of the Beats to the dense, turbulent years between V-J Day and Korea. Long before the Eisenhower 1950s, when they leapt into the public's aghast notice, Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs were forging their movement.

Then, as always, Ginsberg was cheerleader -- resourceful, remorseless self- (and selfless) literary promoter. I remember these sleepless epiphanies of 1948," Ginsberg wrote decades later. "Everywhere in America transcendental brain consciousness was waking up from Times Square . . . to Berkeley's Groves of Academe."

In the Washington Post, George Will struck a nostalgic note by debunking Ginsberg as a drug-addled mediocrity who made a career of "execrating" American values, and died -- such is the American way -- "full of honors," after pocketing huge advances.

Time magazine, Ginsberg 's old obsession, though it is no longer the powerhouse it was in the 1950s, summoned up sufficient hauteur to call "Howl" a "profane tirade" and condescend to its author as the "quintessential beatnik poet."

In the 1950s, it was customary to confuse the Beats with their camp followers (the "beatniks") and dismiss the lot as unwashed know-nothings. The novelist Herbert Gold (I believe he has since changed his mind) wrote of "a pack of unleashed zazous." According to Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, their agenda was "kill the intellectuals."

Yet the Beats burst definitively from underground when a poem -- a poem! -- could become a battle cry. In Ginsberg's own wondering words, "Like this was the end of the McCarthy scene, and here I was talking about super-Communist pamphlets on Union Square and the national Golgotha and the Fascists and the things that turned out to be implicit in a social community revolution that was actually going on."

Poems may seem like relics in today's electronic cyberspace, but Ginsberg, old and young, went by the credo of his teacher, William Carlos Williams, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there." He knew that a poem can burst the walls of prison houses.

Far from being know-nothings, the Beats were prodigious readers and consumed with words. Kerouac described the cottage he and Ginsberg briefly shared in Berkeley, as filled with "books, books, books, hundreds of books, everything from Catullus to Pound to Blyth to albums of Bach and Beethoven (and even one swinging Ella Fitzgerald album with Clark Terry very interesting on trumpet)."

The Beats were actually far more devoted to classics -- "monuments of unaging intellect" -- and less besotted with popular culture than any American literary generation that has followed.

It all depends on how you look at it. Sight in one direction, and as Time puts it, Ginsberg "prefigured punk and New Age, encompassing protest and psychedelics." Look in another, and his secret sharers are old hermetic wizards and T. S. Eliot.

After the 1970s, according to the cocksure "Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry," while "his fame as historical rebel and star performer" shone ever more brightly, Ginsberg's inspiration, like his influence, faded, despite a "refreshing refusal to mature."

Still, let it be said, for more than forty years, from the age of Ike to the age of Bill, Allen Ginsberg literally embodied Ezra Pound's definition of poetry. He was news that stayed news.