No Establishment is likely ever to recruit Bukowski. He belongs in the small company of poets of real, not literary, alienation, that includes Herman Spector, Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Patchen and a large number of Bohemian fugitives unknown to fame. His special virtue is that he is so much less sentimental than most of his colleagues.

Yet there is nothing outrageous about his poetry. It is simple, casual, honest, uncooked. He writes about what he knows- rerolling cigarette butts, cashing in the neighbor's milk bottles to get two-bits for the morning visit to the bookmaker, the horse that came in and the hundred-dollar call girl that came in with it, the ragged hitch-hiker on the road to nowhere, the poignant, natural real scene around him where the last ride set him down.