Grimly reconciled though one may be to the annual flood of books by and about the Beat Generation, it’s particularly depressing to see Jack Kerouac’s poetry, of all things, enshrined in the Library of America, that magnificent series designed to preserve for posterity the treasures of our national literature. To read through these seven hundred–odd pages of Kerouac’s staggeringly slapdash effusions set in elegant Galliard, outfitted with the usual meticulous editorial apparatus, and bound—like Twain’s novels and Lincoln’s speeches—in a beautiful Library of America volume is enough to trigger a serious attack of cognitive dissonance.

Earnest souls who are prepared to give Kerouac’s outpourings every possible chance, and who yearn for guidance and insight from someone who admires them, can expect no help from the editor Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, whose introduction mixes pages and pages of quotations from the poems themselves with doses of hyperbole about the composition of verse. (“To be a poet’s poet is to hurt. To hurt singularly, to hurt incomprehensibly, to suffer a wound that never heals, a wound not meant to heal because bleeding is the very nature of this wound—it is a divine gift—it is the wound of a savior.”) She does manage to make a couple of coherent points—namely, that Kerouac was deeply Catholic and grew up surrounded by death—but this doesn’t even begin to help us figure out what to make of these poems, throughout which, consistent in his indifference to technique, Kerouac is clearly speaking to no one but himself.