On Allen Ginsberg and T.S. Eliot and what they have in common

Poking around in an anthology of Modern Poetry (English-language) over the past few weeks and have just re-read for first time in many years the first section of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which led me to think about the two poets who meant the most to me when I was a h.s. student: Ginsberg and T.S. Eliot. How do you compute that? Could two poets be farther from each other in style, sensibility, world view? One with these tight controlled lines and with hundreds of allusions to mythology and classical literature, the other with a super-abundance of imagery and exploded lines and only the occasional reference to anything outside of his personal experience (nods here and there to the Symbolists, Gardia Lorca, Whitman)? The one who measures out his life in coffee spoons and the other in "cock and endless balls"? But they actually do have some elements in common and points of contact. First, they both offer us their vision of a ruined and deracinated world, with the poet as seer-prophet: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness; I had not thought death had undone so many. Both were innovators who well understand the power of poetry to shock readers/listeners into awareness. I've noted before that the 3rd line of Prufrock was the most shocking line of poetry ever written (after the singsong, pedestrian initial rhyming couplet, this: "...Like a patient etherized upon a table.") And Ginsberg's Howl - though composed for Whitmanesque long lines w/out conventional rhyme or obvious scansion - depends to a great extent on the shock of unexpected images, in particular a noun w/ an unexpected modifier: grandfather night, hydrogen jukebox. Both Eliot and Ginsberg can set a scene with just a few words: "lonely men in shirtsleeves learning out of windows" and "Newark's bleak unfurnished room." Of course I did not comprehend these similarities when I was a teenage reader, and in fact I don't think I could have understood either poet. I "got" Prufrock but The Waste Land and Gerontion were to me just a barely intelligible, and the 4 Quartets were untouchable. Howl, well, somehow I (and some friends, thanks DC!) saw it as a siren call - who wouldn't want to live this exciting life once we were older, free, unloosed from out tight suburban community - and of course we read right through the devastation of mental illness (which we did understand from Kadish -  something that could affect an older generation, not would-be hipsters like us), the alcohol and drug abuse, the dangers of streetlife, the pain of surreptitious homosexual desires and unprotected sex, the self-destructive behavior - I probably didn't think about this poem as a warning and a lamentation. Today, it's equally exciting to read, but it's also sorrowful in a way that as I young man I could never articulate or understand. And Eliot - today, to me, I still love to read his work but I see now the racism, the repression, the tendency to show off his learning rather than to use his learning to illuminate, and, in the later poems, the oracular tendencies and pronunciations. Still, to re-read these two great writers, each trying to enunciate a world view and to make sense of their life's experience, is a pleasure - especially seen against the insipid, inaccessible "language poetry" that continues to appear in the New Yorker and in many (most? all?) literary magazines.