Wales Visitation

The poem is written in free verse and has nine stanzas.

Ginsberg employs a cataloguing technique, commonly used in Walt Whitman's poetry (who Ginsberg was strongly influenced by), in which descriptions of many entities of the landscape are presented to provide the reader with a rich absorbing image of the natural environment.

The most prevalent poetic device Ginsberg employs is personification, which helps to unite the objects described in the poem by recognising the humanity in all entities, ultimately building upon the primary theme of the poem, oneness.^[3]

Ginsberg was interviewed on May 7 1968 by William F. Buckley Jr. on his television show Firing Line and he recited the poem in front of Buckley and the live audience.^[10]

Philip Glass composed a piece of music called Echorus in the winter of 1994–95 for the Compassion Through Music project. This was first performed in 1996 with Ginsberg reading his poem Sunflower Sutra over the music. In a later recording in 2001 with the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, Echorus was performed again but with Wales Visitation being recited instead.^[11]

An exhibition was installed at the National Museum Cardiff called "Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art" in 2014, in which the poem was used as a origin to explore other works that were inspired by or connected to the culture and landscape of Wales.^[1]