Allen Ginsberg American Literature Analysis
When “Howl” was published, Ginsberg sent a copy to his former teacher at Columbia University, Lionel Trilling, a man widely regarded as one of the foremost professors of American literature. Trilling, who was fond of Ginsberg and wanted to encourage him, wrote in May, 1956, “I’m afraid I have to tell you that I don’t like the poems at all. I hesitate before saying that they seem to me quite dull . . . [but] I am being sincere when I say they are dull.” The significance of Trilling’s reply is not simply that he was unable to appreciate an exceptional poem but that he was unprepared to recognize the qualities of an entire tradition in American literature. Trilling’s training and experience had prepared him to respond with intelligence and insight to poems which the academic critical establishment regarded as important. The influence, however, of the New Critics—the writers who followed the teaching of such men as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom—left a line of poetic expression from Walt Whitman through Ezra Pound and on to Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and now Ginsberg essentially invisible.
When Ginsberg finished “Howl,” many poets outside the academic and publishing network of power were extraordinarily enthusiastic ( Kenneth Rexroth said that the poem would make Ginsberg famous “bridge to bridge,” meaning across the entire American continent), but many critics and professors attacked it as formless and haphazard, the work of an uneducated buffoon. This particularly angered Ginsberg, who expected some misunderstanding but was especially disappointed that his own careful analysis of poetry in the English language and his efforts to find an appropriate structure for his thoughts had been so completely missed.
In addition to Trilling, Ginsberg sent a copy to his old mentor William Carlos Williams with a letter pointing out “what I have done with the long line,” his basic rhythmic measure, a unit of breath which replaced the more familiar meter as a means of organizing the images of the poem. He believed that this “line” had what he called an “elastic” quality that permitted “spontaneity” and that its “rhythmical buildup” would lead to a “release of emotion,” a human quality which he believed had been removed from the formal and often ironic stance taken by twentieth century poetry.
Although Whitman obviously was one of his models in his attempt to reclaim the life of an ordinary citizen as a subject as well as for his characteristically long-breath lines, Ginsberg also mentioned American poet Hart Crane and English Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (citing his 1821 volume Epipsychidion, in particular) and William Wordsworth (“Tintern Abbey”) as influences. While Ginsberg was describing his modernist method of composition as “observing the flashings on the mind” and casually dismissing most editing by issuing the dictum “First thought, best thought,” he also insisted on pointing out his lifelong familiarity with the traditional “bearded poets of the nineteenth century” that he had read in his father’s home.
This solid background with conventional poetry was missed at first by critics who were overwhelmed by the originality of Ginsberg’s writing and by his insistence on including all of his primary concerns—his amalgam of religions (Jewish/Buddhist/Hindu), his homosexuality, his radical politics, and his particular current literary enthusiasms—in his writing. When Ginsberg spoke of “compositional self exploration,” he was challenging the idea that the poet worked everything out beforehand and selected an approved form to contain his thoughts. Ginsberg was, instead, one of the first proponents of Charles Olson’s well-known definition that “form is never more than an extension of content,” seeking...
(This entire section contains 4848 words.)
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to “graph the movement of his own mind” without the limitations of grammatical, syntactical, or quasi-literary conceptions about what was and was not poetic.
Ginsberg’s intentions were ultimately to remake or restore American poetry, “to open the field” to its fullest dimensions. The mass media’s misguided view of Ginsberg as a somewhat pathetic jester was obliterated by Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, 1947-1980, which made it clear just how much a part of the main current of American poetry Ginsberg had become. It was not a matter of Ginsberg’s ideas replacing previous orthodoxy as a dominant mode but rather of a recognition that the approaches and ideas upon which Ginsberg insisted must be given the serious attention they require. From the sequence of what Ginsberg called “strong-breath’d poems,” one might also derive a kind of counter-strain of lyrics which would not be “peaks of inspiration” in the most profound sense, but which exhibit Ginsberg’s zany, Keatonesque comic spirit and his heartfelt commingling of sadness and sweetness.
They also demonstrate his extremely sharp eye for detail amid the intricate landscape of American culture and his consistently inventive use of contemporary American speech on all levels, mixed with a classic English-American diction. The poems included in this mode begin with “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley” and “A Supermarket in California,” which Ginsberg describes as one poem in two parts that he wrote to satisfy his curiosity about whether “short quiet lyrical poems could be written using the long line.” The poignance of Ginsberg’s lament in “A Supermarket in California” for the promise of an earlier America still alive among symbols of contemporary American decay, and his homage to Whitman in the poem’s conclusion, in which he addresses Whitman as “lonely old courage-teacher,” evoke a mood of lyric innocence that is sustained by poems throughout his career.
The comic nature of Ginsberg’s work, often using his poetic persona as the source and object of the joke, is evident in poems such as “Yes and It’s Hopeless” (1973), “Junk Mail” (1976), “Personals Ad” (1990), and especially in “I Am a Victim of Telephone” (1964), where his reveries are constantly interrupted by the telephone, which demands he respond immediately because “my husband’s gone my boyfriend’s busted forever my poetry was/ rejected.” Because Ginsberg is essentially serious, however, his use of comic situations tends to underscore and to temper his earnestness so that when he vows in “America” (1956) that “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,” his humor works as both a defense against a hostile world and as an expression of his modesty beneath his almost epic claims. In addition, the comic moods of his poems are often a product of his sheer delight in the weirdness of existence, another aspect of his ultimately optimistic and even exuberantly enthusiastic response to the world.
A major part of Ginsberg’s world has always been his friends and literary companions, and they, too, figure prominently in his poetry. Cassady, Orlovsky, Kesey, and Burroughs are mentioned in various poems and dedications to collections, but the poem that unites generations of artists with a similar sensibility is “Death News” (1963). Ginsberg, upon learning of William Carlos Williams’s death, recalls an earlier occasion when he, Kerouac, Corso, and Orlovsky sat “on sofa in living room” and asked for “wise words.” Williams’s wisdom—“There’s a lot of bastards out there”—moves Ginsberg toward a celebration of the older poet in which he recognizes Williams’s ability to retain humaneness in his life and art even though he is aware of the “bastards.” From this lesson, Ginsberg proceeds to a series of reconciliations, including the theological (conflicting religious backgrounds), the local with the eternal, and most important in this context, the generational, as there is a mutuality of feeling and respect between the poets of two ages.
A similar Whitmanic generosity of spirit is displayed in “Who Be Kind To” (1965), a poem in which Ginsberg goes beyond the sympathy he extends to his friends to offer love to an often hostile environment. The community of underground artists with whom Ginsberg began his writing has broadened to include many members of the more traditional cultural enclaves, but there is still a very destructive force at large in the United States that Ginsberg has always opposed; in poems such as “Bayonne Entering NYC” (1966) or “Death on All Fronts” (1969), the ugliness and lethal pollution of the world is presented as a sickness to be challenged with the mind-awakening strength of the soul. This is what Ginsberg always tried to do in his poetry, beginning with “Howl,” which identified and described the psychic disaster, on through all the other poems that have uncovered and examined fears and desires denied and repressed and have then demanded that these impulses be accepted as a part of the totality of human experience.
“Howl”
First published: 1956 (collected in Howl, and Other Poems, 1956, 1996)
Type of work: Poem
The poet laments the loss of sensitive young people destroyed by society, castigates the forces behind the destruction, and concludes in a spirit of affirmation.
When Ferlinghetti heard “Howl” for the first time, he wrote Ginsberg a note asking for the manuscript so that he could publish it and repeated Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words to Walt Whitman upon the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Many others shared his enthusiasm.
The tremendous energy that Ginsberg had generated with his images and gathered with his rhythmic structure was impossible to avoid, but while those who were open to all the possibilities of “language charged with meaning” (in Ezra Pound’s famous phrase) were excited and inspired by the poem, a very strong counterreaction among academic critics and others frightened or appalled by Ginsberg’s subject matter and approach produced some very harsh criticism.
Norman Podhoretz attacked “Howl” for “its glorification of madness, drugs and homosexuality, and . . . its contempt and hatred for anything and everything generally deemed healthy, normal or decent.” Ginsberg felt that the poem spoke for itself in terms of his ideas and attitudes, but what bothered him was how the poetic qualities behind its composition seemed to have been overlooked in the furor. Even if he saw himself as a poet who, in the ancient sense, was a prophet who offered insight which could guide his race, he was, initially, a poet. Therefore, it was his “craft or sullen art” (as Dylan Thomas put it) which he offered as his proclamation of intention, and when it was misunderstood, Ginsberg explained or taught the poem himself.
His work prior to 1955 had consisted primarily of imitations of earlier poets or variations on early modernist styles. Then, in a crucial moment of self-awareness, he decided “to follow my romantic inspiration—Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath.” His plan was to write down (or “scribble”) images flashing across his perceptual circuits in an overview of his entire life experience. From the famous first line, “I saw the best minds of my generation . . . ,” Ginsberg compressed or condensed the life stories of his acquaintances—students, artists, drop-outs, madmen, junkies, and other mutants deviating from the conventional expectations of the muted 1950’s into what he called “a huge sad comedy of wild phrasing.” He used the word “who” to maintain a rhythmic pulse and to establish a base from which he could leap into rhapsodic spasms of language:
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connectionto the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smokingin the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floatingacross the tops of cities contemplating jazz.
When he realized that it would be difficult to sustain such a long line, he juxtaposed disparate items and elements in a kind of verbal associative collage. He likened his technique to a haiku that involved a clash of images which maintained an element of mystery while putting “iron poetry back into the line.” The first part of the poem was designed to be a lament for what Ginsberg felt were “lamblike youths” who had been psychically slaughtered by American society, and it was conceived in a “speechrhythm prosody to build up large organic structures.”
In the second section, Ginsberg identified “an image of the robot skullface of Moloch,” which he used as a symbol for the devouring power of every destructive, inhuman, and death-driven feature of American life. His plan was to use a version of a stanza form, which he divided further by inserting and repeating the word “Moloch” as a form of punctuation; within each stanzaic unit, he defined the attributes of Moloch in order to form a picture of what he called “the monster of mental consciousness.” Ginsberg builds this section to a climax of exclamation before temporarily releasing some of the accumulated tension in a vision of a breakdown or breakthrough where the social contract can no longer bind the diverse impulses of energy into any coherent arrangement. The lingering effect of the section is that of a ritual of exorcism, an incantation that develops a spell of sorts through the effect of a chant that alters consciousness.
Part 3 takes as its subject Carl Solomon, an old friend of Ginsberg from the time he spent in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, who is the conspectus of all the “best minds” of part 1, a victim/hero of modern American life to whom Ginsberg pledges a unity of spiritual allegiance in his incarceration in Rockland Mental Hospital. Ginsberg took the form of this section from Christopher Smart, whose poem “Jubilate Agno” (“rejoice in the lamb”) of the eighteenth century used a statement-counterstatement stanza which Ginsberg appropriated so that “I’m with you in Rockland” is followed by “where . . .” in a “litany of affirmation.”
Ginsberg described the third part as “pyramidal, with a graduated longer response to the fixed base,” and the last image of the poem depicts Solomon at the door of Ginsberg’s “cottage/ in the Western night.” The poem does not end with a period, however, suggesting the almost utopian hopes for a better future which Ginsberg maintained. Even if the poem now seems almost overwrought in spots, it contains the central concerns of Ginsberg’s work: the intense interest in sound appropriate to a poet firmly in the oral tradition, a fierce condemnation of the worst of American politics, a commitment to an explicit statement of erotic intention, and a rapturous reaction to the wonder of the universe akin to religious ecstasy.
“Kaddish”
First published: 1961 (collected in Kaddish, and Other Poems, 1958-1960, 1961)
Type of work: Poem
The poet offers the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead as a celebration of his mother’s life and his feeling for her suffering.
One of the central formative experiences of Ginsberg’s life was the decline into mental illness of his mother, Naomi, a wrenching psychic ordeal that he internalized for the first four decades of his life before confronting his feelings in the poem “Kaddish,” which he composed in bursts of confessional exhilaration from 1958 through 1961. The trigger for the central narrative section of the poem, a biographical recollection of his mother’s life, was a night spent listening to jazz, ingesting marijuana and methamphetamine, and reading passages from an old Bar Mitzvah book.
Ginsberg then walked out into New York City, and with his mind racing with the rhythms of the Hebrew prayers, he found himself covering the same ground his mother had known in her early youth. As his thoughts turned to her life, and to his inability to talk to her directly as an adult, he remembered that she had been buried three years before without the traditional Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Determined to honor her memory before God, to face his own doubts about death and about his relationship with his mother, and to come to terms with his life to that point, Ginsberg began with a direct exposition of his feelings, “Strange now to think of you, gone,” and withheld nothing as he re-created the full emotional depth of their life together.
“Kaddish” is both an extended elegy and a dual biography. For the poet himself, it is a “release of particulars,” the “recollections that rose in my heart,” which he views with a mixture of lingering nostalgia for childhood and a dread of how details apprehended in innocence take on a darker cast when seen in terms of the course of a person’s life. His own journey from early youth to his present middle age is a parallel to the path that Naomi took from a youthful beauty, “her long hair wound with flowers—smiling—playing lullabies on mandolin,” to Naomi “At forty, varicosed, nude, fat, doomed.” Her mental illness and paranoia, which baffled and frightened him in his youth, are now a lurking threat to his own mental stability, especially as he has experienced visions and hallucinations of awesome power. The direction of their lives, of everyone’s life, is toward “the names of Death in many mind-worlds,” and it is this awesome certainty that has driven Ginsberg to open the paths to his subconscious. Rebuked by his mother’s madness in life, and by her silence now, the poet thinks with gratitude of his mother no longer suffering, but he realizes that he will not find any kind of peace because he still has not “written your history.”
The central incident in the second section concerns the trip that the twelve-year-old Ginsberg took with his mother on a public bus to a rest home. The awful implications of unpredictability and confusion in the presence of one who is supposed to provide stability turn the child into a quasi-adult but one without guidance or education. While not blaming himself for his inability to handle the situation, he knows (even at the age of fifteen) that an inescapable incursion of the chaotic has been planted in his mind. In this lengthy narrative, carried along image by image through the power of Ginsberg’s language, the world in which the poet developed his mind and began to shape his art comes into focus. It is a picture of American life in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, and as Naomi retreats into mental illness, Ginsberg recalls how his political ideals, nascent poetic instincts, and sense of himself grew toward the poet who is writing this psychic history.
As the section concludes, Ginsberg turns his complete attention to his mother, indicating her madness by the seemingly logical but disjointed fragments of her conversation that he reproduces and using the power of very graphic physical details of the body’s collapse as a metaphor for the decay of the mind. The extreme frankness with which Ginsberg describes his mother in a state of increasing deterioration is jolting in its candor, but it also functions as a seal of authenticity, implying an overall veracity, as the most painful of memories have been reconstructed.
The long decline that his mother suffered is so stunning that the poet is moved to prayer in the face of his helplessness, introducing the literal Hebrew words of the Kaddish, providing the prayer that the world withheld at her death. His own contribution, though, is not only to create a context of appropriateness for the ancient words but also to supply in language his own appreciation of his mother’s best qualities. As the long second section moves toward a conclusion, Ginsberg employs a familiar poetic motif, setting the power of language in celebration of the beautiful against the agony of circumstance. Returning to some of the more traditional features of the elegiac mode (modeled on Shelley’s Adonais, 1821), which he has held in reserve, Ginsberg declares:
holy mother, now you smile on your love,your world is born anew, children run naked in the field spotted with dandelions,
and sings,
O glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck first mysticlife & taught me talk and music, from whose pained head I first took Vision—
and concludes:
Now wear your naked-ness forever, white flowers in your hair, your marriage sealed behind the sky—no revolution might destroy that maidenhood— beautiful Garbo of my Karma.
The closing lines of this part quote a letter that Ginsberg received from his mother only days before her final stroke, in which she tells him “the key” is “in the sunlight in the window.” The image of light immediately precedes her salutation,“Love,/ your mother,” that Ginsberg ratifies, “which is Naomi—” as an acknowledgment of his own love.
The last section of the poem is called “Hymmnn,” and it is divided into three parts. The first is a prayer for blessing that examines the “key” image, the second a recapitulation of some of his mother’s attributes in a catalog of her characteristics, and the third what Ginsberg called “another variation of the litany form” in which the poem ends in waves of “pure emotive sound” varying the words “Lord lord lord” and “caw caw caw.” The poem is not really complete for Ginsberg, as he added a reflection on it in “White Shroud” (1983) and suggested that other parts might appear as well. It is not a really difficult poem, but it is not a comfortable one either, and in resisting all the temptations to use centuries of sentimental associations with motherhood, Ginsberg has placed an archetypal relationship in a vivid and original light, reaching depths of feeling rarely touched except in the most powerful art.
“Kral Majales”
First published: 1965 (collected in Kral Majales, 1965)
Type of work: Poem
In accepting the Czechoslovakian honor of “King of May,” Ginsberg attacks the evils of both communism and capitalism and extols the life-giving powers of art.
Among the links in the “chain of strong-breath’d poems,” “Kral Majales” contains some of Ginsberg’s strongest affirmations of human love as a force sufficient to overcome the powers of evil. The poem was written in May, 1965, after Ginsberg had been “sent from Havana” when his hosts found that he was not sympathetic to their suppression of unconventional behavior, and then “sent from Prague” when the authorities became nervous that a hundred thousand Czech citizens were deliriously cheering a bearded, anarchic American poet who was advocating action directly opposed to the political workings of their drab dictatorship. Ginsberg had been chosen as King of May by students and intellectuals in an ancient custom that had endured centuries of upheaval and conquest by foreign empires.
The poem begins as a comic rant juxtaposing the foolishness of capitalists who “proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the Naked” with his disappointment in the actuality of a communist government after hearing his mother “reading patiently out of Communist fairy book.” Instead of a worker’s paradise, the Communists “create heavy industry but the heart is also heavy.”
After a balance of images condemning the idiocy of both sides, Ginsberg shifts the tone of the poem completely; he sets against the darkness of modern industrial decay at its most deadly the life-giving properties of the office with which he has been honored and which he honors in the poem. In a great list, he describes the King of May—himself, in this current incarnation—as a mythic savior who offers the powers of art, love, invention, true religion, and the excitement of language in action. Using the phrase “I am” to keep the beat, his long line pulses with energy; the method of juxtaposition utilized in “Howl” is even more concentrated and direct:
And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,and I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in amour,and I am the King of May, which is long hair of Adam and the Beard of my own bodyand I am the King of May, which is Kral Majales in the Czechoslovakian tongue,and I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name.
Ginsberg goes on to cite his other qualifications, including an inclusive, ecumenical vision of religion, labeling himself a “Buddhist Jew/ who worships the Sacred Heart of Christ the blue body of Krishna the straight back of Ram/ the beads of Chango the Nigerian singing Shiva Shiva in a manner which I have invented.” “Kral Majales” concludes with the almost breathless excitement of the poet arriving at “Albion’s airfield” still vibrating with the excitement of the poem’s composition.
“On Cremation of Chögyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara”
First published: 1987 (collected in Cosmopolitan Greetings, 1994)
Type of work: Poem
The poet evokes a mood of spiritual transcendence in his description of the ritual cremation of the teacher who guided him on a journey of philosophical exploration.
Allen Ginsberg’s poem celebrating the life and teachings of Chögyam Trungpa, “On Cremation of Chögyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara,” was written as a heartfelt tribute to his spiritual guide on the occasion of the burial ceremony conducted in Vermont by friends and students. Ginsberg’s description of the events of the afternoon is designed to convey the inspirational effect of his teacher’s life in the evocation of the exuberant mood of the gathering. Using a characteristic signature phrase similar to those in other well-known poems, “I noticed . . . ,” Ginsberg adopts the position of a keen-eyed commentator, both involved and able to maintain a perspective with sufficient distance to acknowledge the power and providence of Trungpa’s wisdom and example.
Beginning with a view of the terrain (“I noticed the grass, I noticed the hills”), the poem is structured as an inward spiral, moving steadily closer to the ceremony, as the poet becomes a part of the celebration. He moves among the spectators arriving, their dress and appearance indicative of the diverse population that was drawn to the guru. Then, the poet tightens the focus, highlighting the distinctive details that form the image-pattern of the poem. Color (“amber for generosity, green for karmic works”), texture (“silk head crowns & saffron robes”), and sound (“monks chanting, horn plaint in our ears”) create an ambience of reverence and respect, charged with the energy practically pouring from the devotees, their families and friends. The poet registers the force of the celebration in his physical response to the myriad stimuli (“I noticed my own heart beating”), a full-body experience that is fused with his intimations of the eternal, expressed in a reversal of narrative direction back toward the outer edges of the scene, with the enduring elements of the natural world (“a misted horizon, shore &/ old worn rocks in the sand”) leading toward a feeling of ecstasy, as the poem concludes with an exultant “I wanted to dance.”
“Fun House Antique Store”
First published: 1992 (collected in Cosmopolitan Greetings, 1994)
Type of work: Poem
The poet relishes the “minute particulars” of the moment, exemplified by the unique and appealing objects he finds in an antique shop on a roadside near Washington, D.C.
Recalling the catalogue of abundance that begins “A Supermarket in California,” “Fun House Antique Store” conveys a similar feeling of excitement at the marvels available to an American citizen among the fundamental things of the American nation. In this poem, it is the apparently mundane objects of life along the road that Ginsberg, in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, sees with delight as he has been “motoring through States” on the way to an event at the nation’s capital. No longer the “isolato” (as Whitman described himself) of the time in 1955 when he was about to publish “Howl” and enter the consciousness of his country, Ginsberg is now prominent enough to be traveling “through Maryland to see our lawyer in D.C.,” but he has retained his ability to recognize the manifestations of the warmly human amid a bleak and forbidding environment, something he did regularly in poems such as “Bayonne Entering NYC.”
Applying his sharp eye for the telling detail, Ginsberg evokes the feeling of an old dwelling made inviting by the accumulation of objects and devices that represent the substance of countless lives. Admiring the “old-fashioned house,” Ginsberg leads the reader on a tour, beginning with an entry past “Flower’d wallpaper, polished banisters/ lampshades dusted, candelabra burnished” that sets the location within the flow of time’s passage. Then, in a profusion of images that extend and deepen the mood of the house, he presents item after item as they appear: “washbowls beside the French doors/ embroidered doilies & artificial flowers/ ivory & light brown on mahogany/ side tables, a brass bowl for cards,/ kitchen with polished stove cold ready/ at Summer’s end to light up with split/ wood & kindling in buckets beside/ the empty fireplace, tongs & screen/ in neat order.”
The second floor is presented with similar attention to detail, until the poet is so overcome with the pleasure of contemplation that he declares, “I wished to make a speech,” and while his praise is not readily acknowledged (“attendants conferred/ minds elsewhere”), one person “applauded our appreciation,” perhaps a figure for the often limited but discerning audience that the poet finds and for which he is grateful even now, somewhat famous, with his “party on its way to the postmodern Capital.”