Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word "poetics. ? But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous "spontaneous prose ? only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice.

Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to...