Clinton Heylin wrote: "in less than six months had turned full circle from the protest singer who baited Paul Nelson into someone determined to write only songs that 'speak for me' … Dylan's ambitions as a writer for the page … may have been further fed at the end of December when he met renowned beat poet Allen Ginsberg, author of "Howl" and "Kaddish"." Dylan was already familiar with Ginsberg's work. By now, beat poetry and French symbolists had become an enormous influence on Dylan's work, as Dylan "passed from immediate folk sources to a polychrome of literary styles". In an interview taken in 1985, Dylan said that he didn't start writing poetry until he was out of high school: "I was eighteen or so when I discovered Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Frank O'Hara and those guys. Then I went back and started reading the French guys, Rimbaud and François Villon."