SOURCE: Portugés, Paul. “Allen Ginsberg's Visions and the Growth of His Poetics of Prophecy.” In Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature, edited by Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain, pp. 157-73. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Portugés details Ginsberg's visionary experiences and their effect on his poetry.]

In the bitter winter of 1944, Allen Ginsberg was crossing by ferry to Manhattan in order to take a scholarship and entrance examination for Columbia University. He was, quite naturally, somewhat frightened and excited. Although almost eighteen years old, he still nurtured a secret desire kindled early in his childhood to help save the poor, the abused masses, God's true children. Shivering in the icy wind of the bright, damp morning, he vowed before his Maker to devote his life to helping the “masses in their misery”—if he could only pass his examination: “I went to take the entrance exam at Columbia, Vowed Forever that if I succeeded in the scholarship test and got a chance I would never betray the Ideal—to help the masses in their misery.”¹

Although successful with his examination, Ginsberg slowly learned that he was incapable of saving the common man. He realized that he was not tough enough and that his plan to become a “pure Debs”²—that is, a good, Socialist lawyer working for mankind—was mere youthful idealism. Consequently, the young intellectual turned to his poetry, feeling comfortable with the idealism of Whitman, the spiritual visions of Blake, and the fiery lamentations of Jeremiah. Even as he tried to merge with the masses (Ginsberg worked at several blue-collar jobs—welder, kitchen helper, seaman), he knew that his path was less physical than intellectual and mystical.

Finding Columbia University to be less challenging and intellectually engaging than he had hoped, Ginsberg began a study of mysticism and poetry under the tutelage of his friends William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. By the time he was about to graduate from Columbia, he had become immersed in the study of Plotinus, St. John of the Cross, Ezekiel and Jeremiah, William Blake, Rimbaud, and many other Western and Eastern visionaries. He was still seeking a vehicle for his youthful idealism, still hoping to help the masses, although he had realized by then that his path stretched into the nether world of mysticism and poetry rather than along the rough roads of radical politics and hard physical labor.

In 1948, the summer before his graduation, Ginsberg sublet an apartment in Harlem from a divinity student, who, it so happened, had left behind an extensive library of mystical literature for Ginsberg to peruse. Broke, reduced to living on a meager diet of vegetables, Ginsberg had little else to do but read these turgid though fascinating accounts of visions and prophecy. In addition, his friends were gone from New York, either traveling or living incommunicado in Texas (Burroughs) and on Long Island (Kerouac). Ginsberg had become quite morose about the prospect of graduating and still not having fulfilled his desire to help save his fellow man. Some other circumstances had recently occurred that made him even more despondent. His involved love-sex-intellectual relationship with Neal Cassady (the secret hero of “Howl”) was abruptly terminated by the fun-loving, never-resting Cassady; he had gone off to California and promptly married. To make matters worse, Ginsberg's mother Naomi (for whom he would write the tragic death lament “Kaddish”) had been incarcerated in a mental institution.

So Ginsberg was alone and depressed in his dingy little room reading his library of mystical literature. One late afternoon in July he was studying Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, his eyes idling over the poem “Ah! Sunflower,” when suddenly he heard a deep, earthen voice in the room. He became transfixed, somehow knowing immediately that it was the voice of William Blake, speaking across the vault of time from beyond the grave: “I didn't think twice … it was Blake's voice.”³

An overwhelming emotion arose in his soul in response to this auditory apparition, a sudden “visual” realization that helped him comprehend the meaning of this awe-inspiring phenomenon. He was, at the moment of this visual sensation, looking out through the window at the sky; suddenly, he felt that, with Blake's voice guiding him, he could penetrate the essence of the universe. He felt himself floating out of his body and thinking that heaven was on earth. He had a great realization that “this existence was it.” His sense of hopelessness vanished. He felt he had been chosen to experience a vast cosmic consciousness. Looking out of his window, the sky seemed very ancient. It was the “ancient place that he [Blake] was talking about, that sweet golden clime.”

Ginsberg experienced a new sense of himself; he felt ready to undertake a new role in life. Everything that had happened to him—the trials and tribulations of his affair with Cassady, and the loneliness he felt being cut off from his mother and friends—had been a necessary part of the spiritual preparation for his vision:

—in other words, that this was the moment I was born for. This initiation. Or this vision or this consciousness, of being alive unto myself, alive myself to the Creator. As son of the Creator—who loved me, I realized, or who responded to my desire.

The Creator had allowed him to see “into the depths of the universe.” His first thought was that it all made sense, that he was a chosen “spirit angel” blessed by this vision of the universe.⁴ His second thought was to “never forget—never forget, never renig [sic], never deny” the apparitional voice and the visual illumination.⁵ He swore never to get lost in the endless maze of superficial distractions offered by mundane jobs and middle-class pursuits of American life. Instead, he became aware of his obligation as a poet to pursue the visionary calling, for “the spirit of the universe was what I was born to realize.”

Across the alley from his room there was an old apartment building, erected circa 1900. Ginsberg became transfixed by the craftsmanship of the cornices of the old tenement. They seemed like the “solidification of a great deal of intelligence and care and love also.” In his heightened state of awareness, he noticed that there was in every corner

where I looked evidences of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. Some hands had placed them there—that some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me. That some hand had placed the sky. No, that's exaggerating—not that some hand had placed the sky but that the sky was the living blue hand itself. Or that God was in front of my eyes—‘existence itself was God.’

Ginsberg is here explaining his experience with hindsight. While he was actually looking at the cornices and bricks, the notion that “existence itself was God” was not a conscious or verbal articulation; it was a feeling he had that everything he saw was a divine object.

The feeling of a divine presence, of a Creator or a God, was what gave Ginsberg a sense of cosmic awe about himself and everything he perceived. He began to have a sensation of “light” and experienced a sense of cosmic consciousness. While staring at the tenement cornices, he became aware of an immediate, deeper universe, an awareness that allowed him to penetrate the surface of things. He felt that the doors of perception had been cleansed, that he was a living example of Blake's demand that the poet must widen the areas of consciousness and be able to see “Eternity in a grain of sand/Infinity in an hour.”

Everything he looked at he saw anew. The bricks and cornices of the apartment building took on a supernatural glow. The sky and the light of the late afternoon became an “eternal light superimposed on everyday light.”⁶ Ginsberg characterized these perceptions as an example of Blake's dictum that the “eye altering alters all.” He felt that the light had always been there but that until the vision he had not been able to see it. The vision of Blake's “Ah! Sunflower” had changed him forever.

Shortly after his first vision, Ginsberg heard Blake's voice again. This time Blake was chanting “The Sick Rose”:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Hearing the voice, Ginsberg became frightened. The awe and exuberance he had felt during his first vision was replaced by a dark sense of doom. Ginsberg thought that he was like the sick rose and that the prophetic poet Blake was seeking him out to make him face death. When he heard the last line of the poem, Ginsberg was convinced that the sick rose was himself and that “Blake's character might be the one that's entered the body and is destroying it, or let us say death, some kind of mystical being of its own, trying to come in and devour the body, the rose.”⁷ In this frame of mind, Ginsberg also felt that he was being instructed, not only about his own death, but about the “doom of the whole universe.” He became morbid, feeling as though he had no alternative but to accept the basic truth of Blake's message. However, once having accepted it, Ginsberg became aware that it possessed a strange yet inevitable beauty. He was scared and delighted, simultaneously.

Hearing the prophecy of doom, Ginsberg became convinced that he had been chosen to experience an ultimate truth. The symbolic, obscure meaning of “this little magic formula statement in rhyme” had been unveiled to him so that he could, as a poet, be party to the secrets that could deliver others, and himself, beyond the universe.⁸ Ginsberg had been given knowledge of death: “my death and also the death of being itself, and that was the great pain. So, like a prophecy, not only in human terms but a prophecy as if Blake had penetrated the very secret core of the entire universe.”⁹

After absorbing the burden of doom he experienced from “The Sick Rose,” Ginsberg had still another vision. He heard Blake chanting in a hypnotic tone the refrains of his poem, “The Little Girl Lost”:

Do father, mother, weep
Where can Lyca sleep.
How can Lyca sleep
If her mother weep.
If her heart does ache
Then let Lyca wake;
If my mother sleep,
Lyca shall not weep.

The effect of the heavy, masculine rhymes caused Ginsberg to go into a deep trance. His consciousness seemed to double, even triple, in its ability to perceive the hitherto secret, unrevealed meaning of things. He realized later that the repetitive sounds of the rhymes, chanted by Blake's “earthen voice” caused him to lose all sense of his body, normal time, and normal consciousness. It was as though he were under a magical spell, bewitched.

As he had identified himself with the dying rose, so Ginsberg thought that the little lost girl, Blake's Lyca, symbolized his deepest self, as well as his universal self. The mother and father seeking the lost child/self/Ginsberg were God the Father and Creator, and Blake. When he heard Blake chanting the lines “if her heart does ache / Then let Lyca wake,” Ginsberg thought that he was being called to “wake” to a state of visionary awareness.

He knew his consciousness had expanded—miraculously—when he looked, once again, at the cornices of the apartment building. He realized he had an altered sense of perception: “Which is what Blake was talking about. In other words a breakthrough from ordinary habitual consciousness into consciousness that was really seeing eternity in a flower … heaven in a grain of sand. As I was seeing heaven in the cornices of the building.” He now saw the cornices as a communication of the eternal in a finite world. The intelligence of the workman who had laid the bricks communicated beyond time and the grave; a lasting intelligence existed, even beyond death.

With this new awareness, Ginsberg began to see everything as symbolic of an eternal intelligence. Before his vision, he had not even noticed the cornices, nor had he noticed the ordinary sunlight. The vision helped him see deeper into everyday reality. Ginsberg had never realized that everything—every object, every body, every “thing”—had sublime, spiritual significance. With his new consciousness, he now saw the cornices as

spiritual labor … that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of industrial tin. Not only that man, the workman, the artisan, but the architect had thought of it, the builder had paid for it, the smelter had smelt it, the miner had dug it up out of the earth, the earth had gone through eons of preparing it. So the little molecules had slumbered for … for kalpas. So out of “all” these kalpas it all got together in a great succession of impulses, to be frozen finally in that one form of cornucopia cornices on the building front. And God knows how many people made the moon. Or what spirits labored … to set fire to the sun.

The awareness Ginsberg achieved on hearing Blake's voice offered him a sense of “total consciousness … of the complete universe” and entailed the ability to see ordinary reality as a compendium of infinite, sublime meanings. It can be compared to Blake staring into the sun and seeing, not only a bright, glowing, orange disc in the sky, but a band of angels singing “holy! holy!” This perception of the sun (or of a cornice) is, according to Ginsberg, “different from that of a man who just sees the sun, without any emotional relationship to it.”

During and after Ginsberg's other visionary experiences—particularly under the spell of Blake's poem “The Little Girl Lost”—he felt as though he had participated in the total consciousness of the universe. The change in his ordinary state of mind allowed him to feel himself in the presence of a Creator, blessed with the ability to see into the truth of things; he had developed “a consciousness that was really seeing all heaven in a flower.” His visions convinced him that he had been chosen as a “spirit angel”—which, he thought, was a “terrible fucking situation to be confronted with.” He realized that his visionary experiences were not unlike the calling forth of the Hebrew prophets by their Creator, when he appeared to them in their visions. Ginsberg was beginning to realize that his role as a poet also entailed a kind of prophetic quest; his immediate problem, though, was how to make this plain to people without alarming them.

In time, Ginsberg would develop an identity of himself as a poet-prophet. It was what he called the “Messianic Thing,” which he worked at over the years. But, at first, the overwhelming sense of his visions was so awesome, so frightening, that he was worried it might scare others away, or that he would be attacked for communicating the awful truths of the surety of death and of universal doom, or even of the blissful and startling perception of eternity:

So there was that immediate danger. It's taken me all these years to manifest it and work it out in a way that's materially communicable to people. Without scaring them or me. Also movements of history and breaking down the civilization. To break down everybody's masks and roles sufficiently so that everybody has to face the universe and the possibility of the sick rose coming true and the atom bomb. Which seems to be becoming more and more justified. So it was an immediate Messianic Thing.

He would experiment in different poetic modes in order to recreate for his readers

a prophetic illuminative seizure. That's the idea: to be in such a state of complete blissful consciousness that any language emanating from that state will strike a responsive chord of blissful consciousness from any other body into which the words enter and vibrate.¹⁰

Ginsberg's aim was to enlighten his readers by writing such miraculous poetry that it would cause them to experience a similar “cosmic awe” to that which Blake's poetry had caused in him. He began to think that there could be no better purpose for his art:

because I believe in it as Miracles
and I wish to express thee a Miracle at last, Man.
and create my miracle merely by writing it down,
Poetry is that secret formula for miracles—
No lesser purpose for my art [.](11)

He considered his writing as a poet-prophet to be part of the miraculous tradition of his creator, William Blake, who had caused miracles in Ginsberg's psyche by having written down his own prophecies. In order to understand Ginsberg's prophetic quest, it is necessary first to consider what he thought the role of poet-prophet involved. Afterwards, I will display how frequently Ginsberg alluded to this role in poems from 1948 onward and then conclude with a discussion of the techniques he used in order to achieve his “Messianic Thing.”

After his experience of hearing Blake's voice and the subsequent heightening of his awareness, Ginsberg spent a considerable amount of time trying to make sense of his visions in light of the role he had been selected by Blake to fulfill. He recognized that the Latin conception of the poet as vates, the prophetic seer, fitted his own identity as a divinely inspired poet who could now see below the surface of reality into the very essence of existence. He returned to his readings in Plato, particularly the Ion and Phaedrus, and applied to himself the description of the poet as divine madman able to glimpse the ultimate nature of things.

When Ginsberg started searching through Blake's writing for a model for his role as poet-prophet, he was startled by Blake's insistence that, ideally, “every man is a Prophet.”¹² Blake thought of all great poetry as prophecy and believed that part of the role of the poet was to help his fellow men perceive the depths of reality. But an important distinction is implied in Blake's notion of prophecy, one that Ginsberg immediately recognized as important for himself. Blake's prophet is not a person who predicts the future; rather, the prophet sees deeper into the meaning of things than other men. As S. Foster Damon points out, Blake's own poem-prophecies “were not prophecies in the conventional sense, as they were written after the facts; but they are prophecies in the poetic sense because they record the eternal formula for all revolutions.”¹³ Blake himself said that prophets “never say, such a thing shall happen. … A prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator” of the future.

Ginsberg's concept of himself as poet-prophet is completely compatible with Blake's notion that prophecy is a formula for revolution. The revolution, in Blake's sense, was not primarily political but, rather, a revolution of sensibility, of consciousness. Ginsberg adopted that notion of prophecy when he declared that his poetry was “a secret formula for miracles,” dedicated to the “zapping of all consciousness.”¹⁴ Poetry dedicated to revolutionary truths was “not merely a sharing of human secrets” but, ultimately, “a sharing of non-human, the cosmic, universal archetypal knowledge of something beyond my own life.”¹⁵

But Ginsberg's secret knowledge was unlike Blake's. Ginsberg's awareness was not of the blissful consciousness of a unified man but of the surety of impending disaster. His poetic prophecy was more akin to that of the Old Testament prophets:

The poetic precedent for this situation is like Ezekiel and Jeremiah and the Hebrew prophets in the Bible who were warning Babylon against its downfall. … They were talking about the fall of a city, like Babylon, or the fall of a tribe, or cursing out the sins of a nation.¹⁶

Ginsberg felt that the kind of prophecies he must write were not unlike those written during the decadent and destructive times of ancient Babylon, but, more than two thousand years later, the situation had become even worse. Witnessing the ever-present threat of the bomb, the death of the great lakes and oceans, and the thoughtless pollution of the air, Ginsberg realized that he could not find a model that compared with the almost certain death, not only of the body, but of the earth—indeed, of existence itself:

But no poets have ever had to confront the “destruction of the entire world” like we have to. … It's so incredible as a subject that you can't even go back to the biblical prophets for a model to say “Well, I think I'll write a poem like Jeremiah now. …” not even Jeremiah had to confront a subject as immense as what I and you have to deal with, which is the end of the habitable human world. Or the millennial salvation of the human world. If we make it past 2000.¹⁷

But how to conceive poetic images so powerful that they can measure up to the horrible reality that the average person faces reading the morning newspaper? No wonder Ginsberg resolved to write a poetry that would, ideally, be what he described as “a catalyst to visionary states of being.”¹⁸ As prophet the poet has such a momentous task that nothing short of a miracle could help him to heighten awareness, not of what is going to happen, but of what is actually happening now. He would try to create a sense of the impending holocaust by making people see things as he saw them and share his belief in the urgent need for change. His prophetic role as a poet, then, included the responsibility of saving humanity from certain extinction, of turning people from a will to die toward a will to cleanse their perceptions. This was the task he felt his visions had awakened him to—the “Messianic Thing,” the task of breaking down everybody's masks and roles so that people had to face the universe and accept that there was no alternative but to seek enlightenment.

As early as 1949 Ginsberg began alluding to his prophetic role in the poems. “Psalm” contains one extremely cryptic stanza that declares he has been chosen for his vatic role and is dedicated to the revolutionary miracles that will come from his art:

A Bird of Paradise, the Nightingale
I cried for not so long ago, the poet's
Phoenix, and the erotic Swan
Which descended and transfigured Time,
And all but destroyed it, in the Dove
I speak of now, is here, I saw it here
The Miracle, which no man knows entire
Nor I myself. But shadow is my prophet,
I cast a shadow that surpasses me,
And I write, shadow changes into bone,
To say that still Word, the prophetic image
Beyond our present strength of flesh to bear.(19)

He begins by listing birds that have represented spiritual quests in literature—the Nightingale (death), the Phoenix (usually rebirth), and even Yeats's “erotic Swan” (possibly regeneration)—declaring that he once yearned for them, as have most poets at one time or another. But, having received his visions, he had to follow a different symbolic bird, the Dove—which, at Christ's baptism, descended as proof that the people's true prophet from God had come on earth to reveal human secrets as well as cosmic, archetypal knowledge. Ginsberg was part of a miracle symbolized in the apparition of the Dove: “[what] I speak of now, is here, I saw it here.” He is, in his early symbolic style, claiming that he is bringing prophetic images “Beyond our present strength to bear.” The image of the Dove appears in several other of Ginsberg's early poems and always alludes to his visionary experience and prophetic anointment—as in the obscure poem “A Very Dove.” The Dove also resurfaces in a poem in his later style of clear presentation and natural voice. Of this poem, likewise called “Psalm,” Ginsberg announces: “This is an eccentric document to be lost in a library and rediscovered when the Dove descends.”²⁰ This symbol is most clearly defined in “Hymn” as the prophetic vision, “the very summa and dove of the unshrouding of finality's joy.” In “Hymn,” he also declares that the Dove is a visionary gleam, the “dreamy essences” of the heart and eternity.

Also in “Psalm,” Ginsberg declares that his poems—his “psalms”—are the result of a prophetic quest induced by “the working of the vision-haunted mind,” as in the tradition of prophets like Ezekiel or Jeremiah. In “After All, What Else is There to Say,” Ginsberg announces that “my poem itself” is his way of telling the truth of prophecy; all he does is wait for the prophetic spirit to enter him, cleansing his perception and heightening his awareness, as it had in Harlem:

but to think to see, outside,
in a tenement the walls of the universe itself
I wait: wait till the sky appears as it is[.]

By 1954, Ginsberg was outwardly characterizing his poetry as “primitive illuminations” and prophetic “apparitions,” with the

anterior image
of divinity
beckoning me out.(21)

In “Psalm III,” written in Seattle in 1956, Ginsberg addresses his Creator, claiming that he will be true to his prophetic role and illuminate everyone, “Beginning with Skid Road.” (“Psalm III” is part of a series of poems on the theme of Ginsberg's prophetic quest. The first, the unnumbered “Psalm,” was written in 1949; the latest was written in the early 1960s and has not been collected in book form.)

The vow in “Psalm III” to save his fellow man, a characteristic of Ginsberg's notion of himself as a “poet-prophet-friend,”²² also parallels the Bodhisattva oath he took about this time, while studying Buddhism in Berkeley with Kerouac and Gary Snyder. A Bodhisattva is similar to a Hebrew prophet in that he is an enlightened man who has achieved satori and vows to help others attain it. In fact, Ginsberg would later describe the Bodhisattva as a prophet whose task it is to save others:

The Bodhisattva is one who sets himself on the path of enlightenment, or perhaps glimpsed enlightenment, and now wants to incorporate it completely … anybody who is a Bodhisattva on the path is not allowed to go to Nirvana all by himself alone and disappear into eternity[.]²³

His vow in “Psalm III” is his prophetic equivalent of the Bodhisattva's pledge that “sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all”:

To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.
Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a higher place, the plaza of eternity.(24)

By the late fifties Ginsberg had become quite frank about his identity as a poet-prophet. In a poem written while under the influence of LSD, he once again attained a vision of his Creator and eternity and felt reaffirmed in his commitment to help mankind attain true knowledge and a recognition of the eternal state:

I see the gay Creator
Bands rise up in anthem in the worlds
Flags and Banners waving in transcendence
One image in the end remains myriad-eyed in Eternity
This is the Work! This is the Knowledge! This is the End of Man!(25)

Ginsberg's claim is that the work of a prophet is to help others achieve a vision of eternity and accept a consciousness that ultimately transcends the body and life. He is committed to “this knowledge,” for it is the “Work” of the poet-prophet.

In the poem that follows, “Magic Psalm” (the second in a series of five drug poems that deal, in part, with his prophetic quest), Ginsberg declares that he is ready for the challenge, boasting that

I am Thy prophet come home this world to scream an unbearable Name thru my 5 senses hideous sixth[.]

(p. 93)

He is announcing that he is prepared for the ultimate prophetic task, making people accept “the possibility of the sick rose coming true.”²⁶ That possibility is death, portrayed in “Magic Psalm” as his prophetic dove: “The Ark-Dove with a bough of Death.” In this poem Ginsberg calls on his Creator to descend and aid him in his prophecy, admitting that while he is afraid, he is ready for the ultimate “disintegration of my mind”:

devour my brain One flow of endless consciousness, I'm scared of your promise must make scream my prayer in fear.

The role of poet-prophet manifested itself in multiple ways in Ginsberg's poetry from 1948-63. “Howl” could easily be interpreted as an Old Testament prophetic poem since Ginsberg studied the rhythms of the Old Testament to achieve the hypnotic cadences of this masterpiece. Many of his poems deal with the prophetic task of making the world conscious of its impending demise: “Howl,” “Europe! Europe!,” “Paterson,” and the series of lyrics that make up his ultimate poem in the Babylon-Jeremiah tradition, The Fall of America. The poet-prophet as a seer, penetrating beneath the surface of reality, is the theme of many of the drug poems (including “Aether,” “The End,” and “The Reply”) in which Ginsberg makes it clear that his endeavor is to enlarge areas of consciousness. This was a serious responsibility, one that drove him to the borders of sanity and led to bouts of despair. At one point he thought his prophecies were going to be completely wasted because of the impending atomic doom:

For instance, I begin to wonder what's the point of writing poems down on paper and printing them, when neither paper nor print nor electricity nor machines nor newspapers nor magazines will survive the next thirty or forty years. Wouldn't it be best if one were to deal only in those forms which are memorizable and singable and which could survive beyond the printing press, if one were interested in “immortality.”²⁷

However, Ginsberg's commitment to the fulfillment of his vatic role was, fortunately, never abandoned. We shall now consider how, to ensure that his themes of death, doom, and eternity would achieve the impact he desired, he invented techniques for writing that would emphasize his message and become, in themselves, an important part of the prophetic mode. All of them come together in “Howl” (1955), the climax of Ginsberg's early development of his prophetic stance.

From 1948 to 1963, then, Ginsberg was preoccupied with the possibility of regaining the sense of “total consciousness” that he had experienced during his Blakean visions. He had the ambition to recreate that kind of awareness and to write poem-prophecies during an illuminative seizure. Later in his career, in poems such as “Aether,” written under the spell of various drugs, he was able to capture the desired sense of cosmic awe. But, in the late forties and during the fifties, psychedelic drugs were not available; consequently, Ginsberg relied on his studies in consciousness to induce the state of mind, the visionary glow, he wished his readers to share.

From the first, Ginsberg realized that the mind has scores of infinitely brief flashes into the essence of things, so he tried to train his consciousness to be constantly aware of these fleeting glimpses of “high epiphanous mind”:

So I try to write during those “naked moments” of epiphany the illumination that comes every day a little bit. Some moment every day, in the bathroom, in bed, in the middle of sex, in the middle of walking down the street, in my head, or not at all. So if it doesn't come at all, then that's the illumination. So then I try and write in that too. So that's like a rabbinical Jewish Hassidic trick that way. So I try to “pay attention all the time.”²⁸

He began to think of writing as a high form of meditation, the object of which was to reach into the consciousness and achieve a heightened awareness, a greater attention. The more focused his mind, the more Ginsberg approached the desired illuminative seizure. When he practiced this meditative technique, he would always consider the writing as though it were a sacred art, indicative of the seriousness and holiness of his vatic role:

The writing itself, the sacred act of writing, when you do anything of this nature, is like prayer. The act of writing being done sacramentally, if pursued over a few minutes, becomes like a meditation exercise which brings on a recall of detailed consciousness that is an approximation of high consciousness. High epiphanous mind. So, in other words, writing is a yoga that invokes Lord mind.

(p. 73)

By learning to focus on each detail that flashes into the mind, Ginsberg was able to achieve this “approximation of high consciousness.” The finer the focus, the deeper the prophetic seizure. His favorite form of meditation was to walk through the streets of New York (one is reminded of Whitman) with a notebook and pencil in hand, focusing on every possible detail:

So you walk down the city streets in New York for a few blocks, you get this gargantuan feeling of buildings. You walk all day you'll be at the verge of tears. More detail, more attention to the significance of all that robotic detail that impinges on the mind, and you realize through your own body's fears that you are surrounded by a giant robot machine which is crushing and separating people, removing them from nature and removing them from living and dying. But it takes walking around all day to get into that state.

(p. 73)

All day Ginsberg would compose using this sacramental method, trying to achieve a “detailed consciousness that is an approximation of high consciousness. High epiphanous mind.” The longer he could sustain his meditative concentration, the higher his state of illumination. In fact, many of his great works, like “Howl” and “Kaddish,” were written in this manner, with Ginsberg sometimes going on for two days or so, using amphetamines generously to fight off exhaustion.

By 1955, when Ginsberg had reached the mature style of “Howl,” he had mastered the technique of using his physical surroundings as both a thematic and a structural foundation. He had also learned how to add to walking and pills various techniques of controlled breathing, each of which enabled him to prolong and plumb the prophetic illuminative seizure. He drew these techniques from an interesting configuration of sources: experiments in breathing that induced a mild euphoria of hyperventilation; the rhetorical cadances in the prophetic poetry of Jeremiah and Christopher Smart; and the saxophone riffs of Lester Young. All gave lift to his images, creating the “singability” that he had said was essential to durable prophetic poetry.

After years of practice, writing in sessions that often took all day, Ginsberg realized that he could compose his poems in rhythmic units that corresponded not only to thought but to his actual breathing pattern. After he had written the “Moloch” section of “Howl,” he became intrigued by the possibility of catalyzing his consciousness in his reader by arranging the rhythmic units to correspond exactly with his own breathing at the time of composition:

the rhythmic units that I'd written down were basically breathing exercise forms which if anybody else repeated would catalyze in them the same basic breathing physiological spasm that I was going through, and so would presumably catalyze in them the same affects or emotions.²⁹

This realization was an extension of the experiments he had first conducted back in the early fifties when he was arranging his prose journal writings into verse, trying to please William Carlos Williams. However, his concern with breath was then more related to actual talking-breath rhythms as he noted by line arrangement the natural breath patterns of normal speech:

I went over my prose writings, and I took out little four or five line fragments that were absolutely accurate to somebody's speak-talk-thinking and rearranged them in lines, according to breath, according to how you'd break it up if you were actually to talk it out. … The influence was that originality of taking materials from your own existence … you articulate “your” rhythm, your own rhythms.³⁰

His interest in breath and natural breathing units, then, began early. However, it was not fully realized until he had written the “Moloch” section of “Howl,” which was composed under the influence of peyote during his exploration of extraordinary states of consciousness:

I had an apt. on Nob Hill, got high on Peyote, & saw an image of the robot skullface of Moloch in the upper stories of a big hotel glaring into my window … I wandered down Powell Street muttering, “Moloch, Moloch” all night & wrote Howl II nearly intact in cafeteria at foot of Drake Hotel, deep in the hellish vale.³¹

The “hellish vale” is a combination of peyote and the meditative practice of focusing attention to induce the prophetic illuminative seizure. After writing the “Moloch” section, Ginsberg realized that the rhythmic units were based on his breathing (aligned with thought units); he believed that anyone reading the “Moloch” section properly would have to “breathe” exactly the way he was breathing while in the heightened state of awareness, the “hellish vale.” He had unconsciously transcribed his prophetic vision into rhythmic units that corresponded to his “breathing physiological spasm.”³² The amazing thing about this theory-practice is that it actually works. By following the rhythmic units, as indicated by punctuation (which is what Ginsberg did in 1948 while reading Blake), the reader can actually experience the “prophetic illuminative seizure” that Ginsberg underwent on peyote and transferred into the “Moloch” section of “Howl.” The underlying assumption of this theory is that breath is ultimately the “director” of an individual's emotional pattern and that in pronouncing the words and repeating the breathing patterns the reader will experience the emotion the poet is trying to convey.

Another writing technique that developed from Ginsberg's day-long meditations during this period was the catalogue and its various attributes, such as the use of anaphora, the free association of detail, and a “rhythmic pulsation” generated as a by-product of the catalogue. During the formative stages of “Howl,” Ginsberg was seeking techniques that could meet the requirements of prophetic versification. By this time, he was consciously working in the prophetic tradition, musing over the difficulties of graphing the movements of the mind. His poetry had to meet the urgent needs of his sense of the “apocalyptic end of history.”³³ Later, he would describe the problem as one of discovering

a poetry adequate to … [the prophetic urgency to communicate a sense of the apocalyptic doom approaching], it's just that we will have taken a realistic estimate of our bodies, of our breath, and of our machinery and our history, and imagined it.

(p. 73)

In order to write like this, Ginsberg sought models in literature where the prophetic urge had already been realized.

The first model he found was, naturally, the Bible. He was interested in the long, rambling, free associative catalogues in passages such as these from The Lamentations of Jeremiah:

He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.
Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand against me all the day.
My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones.
He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail.
He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.
He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out; he hath made my chain heavy.

The obvious characteristic of this passage is the cataloguing of Jeremiah's afflictions to underscore his sorrow: God “hath” done this and “hath” done that. Ginsberg was impressed by this litany of complaint, admiring its allowance of a kind of free association of thought. The catalogue, in Ginsberg's interpretation, allowed the writer to link together the mind's thoughts in a natural way without any restraints of linear structure or logical connection. It seemed a perfect way for him to record the explorations in consciousness he performed in his daily writing-meditation sessions, a way for him to be true to the mind without any encroachment of predetermined form or literary decorum.

His literary model for the catalogue in writing “Howl” was not, perhaps surprisingly, Whitman, but the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, especially the catalogues of Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”). Ginsberg was interested in Smart because he was a visionary lauded by Blake who had also spent time in a mental institution. When Ginsberg read Smart's Jubilate, he was impressed by the use of the catalogue and the contemporary quality of the verse:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he began to consider himself.(34)

As in the passage from Jeremiah, the poet is not concerned with a linear progression or development of an argument of a classical beginning, middle, and end. He is, as Ginsberg noted, merely freely associating. Ginsberg was also impressed with the rhythmic pulsation that the Hebrew prophet and Smart both employed. In Jeremiah, the repetition of “He hath” at the beginning of almost every line created a hypnotic rhythm that was not only indicative of the Hebraic form of prayer but was a technique used in most religious settings to create a feeling of inspiration and piety. Smart used this technique in the repetition of “For” at the beginning of each of his lines.

The catalogue, then, presented for Ginsberg not only a model in sound but also a method of free-association that liberated the mind for exploration of epiphanous consciousness. At the same time, by using the rhythmic pulsation, this repetitive technique caused a religious feeling approaching that of prayer. So, he began experimenting with the catalogue and its primary techniques in an attempt to write a “beautiful enough prophecy with such exquisite penetrant prosody that the hardest hat will vibrate with delight.”³⁵

Actually, Ginsberg's first published use of the catalogue (its only use until “Howl”) appeared in Paterson, the poem that is a prototype for “Howl.” Ginsberg uses the catalogue in his condemnation of a repressive society, as exemplified in the second stanza:

rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun;
rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinatti:
rather drag a rotten railroad tie to Golgotha in the Rockies[.](36)

Although written six years prior to “Howl,” these lines were not published until 1960, when “Paterson” appeared in Kulchur #1. Like Smart's use of “For” and Jeremiah's use of “He hath,” Ginsberg's use of “rather” not only creates the rhythm but gives the poem a cohesive form. As in Jeremiah, the poem is a lamentation of woes endured. It has the hypnotic quality of a religious litany.

However, the experiments with the catalogue were not fully realized until sometime in 1954, when Ginsberg began the initial sketches for “Howl.” By this time, with Kerouac's encouragement, Ginsberg had become interested in jazz, particularly in the saxophone improvisations of Lester Young. Ginsberg saw that Young made use of a recurrent theme in his long, stoned-out riffs that were freely associational. Each riff started with a repeated cadence. Young composed his saxophone score, Ginsberg thought, in a manner similar to the way Smart and Jeremiah wrote, using a catalogue of associations sustained by the repetition of the same note or a similar initial series of notes:

Lester Young, actually, is what I was thinking about … Lester Leaps in, Howl is all Lester Leaps In. And I got that from Kerouac. Or paid attention to it on account of Kerouac, surely—he made me listen to it.³⁷

Kerouac's insistence that Ginsberg listen to Young and Charlie Parker, among others, resulted in his acceptance of the catalogue as the basic paradigm for “Howl.” In his “Notes for Howl and Other Poems,” written in 1959, Ginsberg identifies the Hebraic model and the jazz sound as the main inspiration for his experiment in the use of catalogue and the long line. (He added Smart to the list in a 1968 conversation with Mark Robinson.) In “Howl Part I,” Ginsberg used “who” as his rhythmic base in the same way Jeremiah used “He hath,” Smart used “For,” or Lester Young used the same riff to start a catalogue of thematic associations.

Instead of quoting the published version of the first part of “Howl,” it would be more interesting to present an earlier version, with cross-outs and additions, to give the reader a more accurate idea of the original experimentation with catalogue that has become so renowned:

          I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, angel headed hipster
wandering around the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters looking for the shuddering connection between the wheels & wires of the machine of the Night
who poverty and tatters and fantastie hollow eyed and high sat up all night in
the supernatural darkness of cold water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who sat in rooms in underwear unshaven burning their dollars in wastebaskets listening to the Terror through the wall
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who chained themselves to subways for an endless ride from Battery to Holy Bronx until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-racked and battered bleak of brain on Benzedrine all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who stood sat in the stale bars of xxerning afternoon in desolate Euphoric bar listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar[.](38)

This fragment, from a letter to William Burroughs dated “S. F. 1955,” was the culmination of Ginsberg's interest in the catalogue, via Jeremiah, Smart, and Lester Young. He was writing a prophecy in the style of Jeremiah's lament, bemoaning the terrible treatment of his “angelheaded hipsters” by a society that was ruthlessly destructive and doomed. He was writing a prophecy in the style of Christopher Smart, using wild flourishes of disconnected images in a collage whose thematic thread was not the cat “Jeoffrey” but the terrible events in his friends' lives. He was writing a prophecy in “long, saxophone-like chorus I knew Kerouac would hear the sound of,” which was molded on the actual saxophone sound of Lester Young, depending on “the word ‘who’ to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from.”³⁹ In fact, Ginsberg remembers the rhythmic paradigm that was going through his head while he was writing the first sketch of “Howl” quoted above. It was based on one of the cuts off the album, Lester Leaps In, and goes something like:

Dadada Dat Dat Da, dada Da da,
Dadada Dat Dat Da, dat da Da da,
Dadada Dat Dat Da, dat da Da da,
Dadada Dat Dat Da, dat da Da da,
Dadada
dadada
                    dada da dadah

[p. 28]

The “Dadada” at the beginning of each “line” is analogous to the “who” in “Howl.” As happens in jazz, the line was to begin with the same anaphoric sound and then add to it; when finished with the “riff,” you return to the “Dadada” or the “who.” The “rhythm” of the catalogue, then, becomes the element of control, freeing the mind for associations without the restriction of trying to make sense of the words or to follow a linear flow of thought.

This particular use of the catalogue became the basis for several of Ginsberg's poems. Besides being used in other sections of “Howl,” it would be used, in “America,” in several parts of “Kaddish,” “Lysergic Acid,” “Psalm III,” “Tears,” and many other poems written during the late fifties and early sixties.

Ginsberg's prophetic quest had a significant influence on his poetics, as demonstrated in his use of physical surroundings, the breath notation of line, and the use of the catalogue. Each of these innovations was a part of his artful devotion to the study of consciousness. His decision to follow Blake's statement that every man was a prophet led him to a practice of writing that involved deep absorption in meditation. The meditation in turn, focused on many of the elements discussed in this essay. His ultimate prophetic ambition was not only to retrieve the heightened awareness he had experienced in his Blake visions but to learn how to induce higher states of consciousness in his readers. In his own way, Ginsberg finally realized his secret ambition, fulfilling the vow that he had taken that cold winter while crossing by ferry to Manhattan, “to help the masses in their misery.”

Notes

1. Allen Ginsberg, Prose Contribution to Cuban Revolution (Detroit: Workshop Press, 1966), no pagination.

2. Ibid.

3. Allen Ginsberg, “The Art of Poetry VIII,” The Paris Review 10 (1966): 36. Material that follows is also from pp. 36-37.

4. Allen Ginsberg, from an unpublished interview conducted by Paul Portugés, July 1976.

5. Ginsberg, “The Art of Poetry VIII,” p. 37. Unless cited, quotes that follow are also from this essay, pp. 38-44.

6. Ginsberg, unpublished interview with Paul Portugés.

7. Ginsberg, “The Art of Poetry VIII,” p. 38.

8. Ginsberg, in an unpublished notebook entry describing Blake's poems.

9. Ginsberg, “The Art of Poetry VIII,” p. 39. Quotes that follow are from pp. 39-44.

10. Allen Ginsberg, “Craft Interview with Allen Ginsberg,” in The Craft of Poetry, ed. William Packard (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1974), p. 72.

11. Ginsberg, from an unpublished journal.

12. Ginsberg, from an unpublished notebook. It is taken from Blake's notes on Watson: “Every honest man is a prophet.”

13. S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (New York: Dutton, 1971), p. 335.

14. Ginsberg, from unpublished papers in the Ginsberg Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University.

15. Gordon Ball, ed., Allen Verbatim (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 104.

16. Ginsberg, “Craft Interview with Allen Ginsberg,” p. 65.

17. Ibid., p. 65.

18. Ibid., p. 70.

19. Allen Ginsberg, Gates of Wrath (Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1972), p. 16.

20. Allen Ginsberg, Empty Mirror (New York: Totem/Corinth, 1961), p. 9.

21. Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963), pp. 24, 33.

22. Ginsberg, from an unpublished journal notation.

23. Alison Colbert, “A Talk with Allen Ginsberg,” Partisan Review 36 (1971): 301.

24. Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches, p. 62.

25. Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish (San Francisco: City Lights, 1961), pp. 90-91.

26. Ginsberg, “The Art of Poetry VIII,” p. 39.

27. Ginsberg, “Craft Interview with Allen Ginsberg,” p. 66.

28. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

29. Allen Ginsberg, Improvised Poetics, ed. Mark Robinson (San Francisco: Anonym Press, 1971), p. 22.

30. Ginsberg, “A Talk with Allen Ginsberg,” p. 297.

31. Allen Ginsberg, “Notes on Finally Recording ‘Howl,’” A Casebook on the Beats, ed. Thomas Parkinson (New York: Thomas Cromwell, 1961), p. 29.

32. Ginsberg, Improvised Poetics, p. 22.

33. Ginsberg, “Craft Interview with Allen Ginsberg,” p. 73.

34. Christopher Smart, “Jubilate Agno,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Revised Shorter Edition), ed. Alexander Allison et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 212.

35. Ginsberg, “Craft interview with Allen Ginsberg,” p. 77.

36. Ginsberg, Empty Mirror, p. 39.

37. Ginsberg, Improvised Poetics, p. 31.

38. Manuscript, Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University.

39. Ginsberg, “Notes on Finally Recording ‘Howl,’” p. 28.