SOURCE: Diggory, Terence. “Allen Ginsberg's Urban Pastoral.” College Literature 27, no. 1 (winter 2000): 103-18.

[In the following essay, Diggory views Ginsberg's poetry as part of the pastoral tradition.]

EXHIBITS

What does Allen Ginsberg want? The question persists in his poetry, where it has acquired something more of a literary emphasis now that the poet himself is dead. Without insisting too rigidly on the boundary between art and life that Ginsberg delighted in crossing, I want to propose the literary concept of “pastoral” as a useful means for exploring the question of Ginsberg's desire. Taken together, the following three exhibits will suggest what I mean by “pastoral” in this connection and how complex a tradition conveys the concept to Ginsberg.

Exhibit 1: In 1977, the poet Kenneth Koch asks Ginsberg, “What would you consider an ideal existence for yourself as a poet?” Ginsberg replies: “Retiring from the world, living in a mountain hut, practicing certain special meditation exercises half the day, and composing epics as the sun sets” (Ginsberg 1977, 9).

Exhibit 2: In 1954, the San Francisco psychiatrist Philip Hicks asks Ginsberg: “What would you like to do? What is your desire, really?” Ginsberg replies:

I really would like to stop working forever—never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now [market research]—and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone—maybe even a man—and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

(Kramer 1969, 42)

Exhibit 3: In 1948, Ginsberg has an “auditory hallucination” of “Blake's voice” in his East Harlem apartment, while feeling “cut off from what I'd idealized romantically” and reading Blake's “Ah! Sun-flower!” (Ginsberg 1967, 302-03):

Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow.
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

(Blake 1970, 25)

Each exhibit emphasizes an attribute traditionally associated with pastoral: withdrawal from society to a simpler existence in accord with nature (the “mountain hut” in Exhibit 1); the desire “to stop working forever” (Exhibit 2), the classical otium (Alpers 1996, 22-25); idealization of nature (the “sweet golden clime” in Exhibit 3). At the same time, it is evident that Ginsberg is drawing on other traditions besides that of Greek and Latin poetry, which has assigned pastoral its conventions as a genre in Western literature. For instance, in the interview from which I have extracted Exhibit 1, Ginsberg looks to Tantric Buddhism rather than Western literature as the source for the “special meditation exercises” he would practice in his retreat. His specific literary goal of “composing epics” probably looks to Blake, within the Western tradition (1967, 317), in opposition to “the Greek & Roman Classics” that Blake regarded as “the Antichrist” (1970, 656).

Through his affiliation with Blake, Ginsberg engages in opposition not only to literary tradition but also to existing social structures, in a way that distinguishes his version of pastoral from the dominant and essentially conservative “post-revolutionary” mode that scholars such as Annabel Patterson have traced from the nineteenth century to the present day (Patterson 1987, 266-68). Patterson's willingness to grant artistic form some measure of independence from historical forces enables her to identify “a wider range of responses” among the practitioners of pastoral than follows, for instance, from Raymond Williams's reduction of pastoral to ideological mystification (Patterson 1987, 139; Williams 1973). Thus, in Blake's illustrations for Virgil's first Eclogue, a surprising undertaking in light of Blake's general antipathy to the Classics, Patterson discovers shepherds serving the ends of political radicalism (Patterson 1987, 252-62). They are the close ancestors of “the crazy shepherds of rebellion” in Ginsberg's “Footnote to Howl” (1984, 134). In turn, the prophetic image of the Lamb of God that Blake derived from Biblical tradition supplies, with reinforcement from Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”), the mystical protagonist that Ginsberg cast in the drama of “Howl” (1955-56): “Part I, a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamblike youths; Part II names the monster of mental consciousness [Moloch] that preys on the Lamb; Part III a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory” (1994, 636). From the children of Israel in the Bible to the “Lamb in America” of “Howl,” this tradition envisions redemption as a collective enterprise, in marked contrast to the individualistic “post-revolutionary ideology” that, according to Patterson, “substitutes introspection for social analysis, and imaginative and spiritual advances for institutional change” (Patterson 1987, 267).

Nevertheless, as Patterson demonstrates in her own practice, a degree of introspection is inevitable for the scholar or poet who engages with pastoral, because the suspension of physical labor in pastoral, the fulfillment of Ginsberg's desire to “never work again” (Exhibit 2), becomes a means of highlighting what Patterson calls “imaginative work” (Patterson 1987, 214), such as Ginsberg envisions in his project of “composing epics” (Exhibit 1). As we will see, Ginsberg ultimately diverges from Blake and remains a more purely pastoral poet in the sufficiency Ginsberg ascribes to the work of vision alone, apart from the work of hands. To follow Ginsberg along this path requires, in turn, shifting the critical terms applied to pastoral itself, from the critique of ideology pursued from Raymond Williams through Annabel Patterson to the critique of consciousness pursued from William Empson through Paul Alpers. As Terry Eagleton has argued (1986), Empson's formulation of “the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple” (Empson 1974, 22) lays down as a premise the complicated relation of the intellectual worker to social forms that only gradually emerges in Patterson's refinment of the Williams tradition. Even more important, for our purposes, Empson makes the crucial move of defining pastoral according to “inner” rather than “outer” form (Alpers 1996, 47). Looking for work as “outer” form, Raymond Williams does not see the complex “double attitude of the artist to the worker” that Empson, taking “attitude” as a mark of “inner” form, sees in pastoral (Empson 1974, 14). Looking for shepherds as conventional guides to the “outer” form of the pastoral genre, literary critics may not even recognize the existence of “urban pastoral,” which requires an understanding of pastoral as mode rather than genre (Alpers 1996, Ch. 2).

Recognizing the mode of urban pastoral is crucial for understanding the connection between the retreat to “a mountain hut” that Ginsberg imagines in Exhibit 1 and the “city-hermit existence” he proposes in Exhibit 2. The “city-hermit” has withdrawn from society in attitude as much as the mountain hermit has withdrawn physically. Even when the “city-hermit” withdraws into behavior that society condemns as criminal, his sensibility is as innocent as that of the shepherd, hence the figure of “the sympathetic criminal” that Empson finds in the novels of Céline and Dostoevsky (Empson 1974, 10-11, 17)—both important authors for Ginsberg (Schumacher 1992, 67, 286-87; 107, 114)—but analyzes most extensively in the “Newgate pastoral” of Gay's Beggar's Opera (Empson 1974, Ch. 6). Remembering his involvement with Herbert Huncke, Little Jack Melody, and Vicki Russell, who were using his apartment for a stolen goods racket while Ginsberg completed his college degree, Ginsberg reflected, “it was like a whole Beggar's Opera scene at my house” (Kramer 1969, 125).

The lens of urban pastoral provided by Empson brings into focus some unexpected alignments for Ginsberg, such as the one with Gay just cited. While it tends to separate Ginsberg from the simple “primitivism” of other Beat writers (Snyder 1985), it highlights his affinities with the New York School poets, despite his own early distinction between “hiptalk” and “queertalk” (Ginsberg 1984, 3). The tradition of homosexual love in pastoral increases the inflection of “queertalk” we hear in Ginsberg's voice the more we recognize his vision as that of pastoral. Notice Ginsberg's shy admission to desiring “maybe even a man” in Exhibit 2. And the more we identify Ginsberg's vision as specifically urban pastoral, the more likely we are to hear echoes of Frank O'Hara, the poet to whom Ginsberg paid the telling compliment, “I see New York through your eyes” (1984, 459). Helen Vendler has applied the concept of “urban pastoral” to place O'Hara in a tradition extending back through William Carlos Williams to Walt Whitman, two forerunners whom Ginsberg was also happy to claim (Vendler 1990, 245). However, since Blake provided Ginsberg's point of entry into this tradition, consideration of Ginsberg's urban pastoral should start from the occasion of Exhibit 3, when Ginsberg learned to see New York through Blake's eyes.

BLAKE

Throughout his career Ginsberg made reference to his “Blake visions” (1967, 291, 312) in 1948 as his initiation into poetry as a sacred vocation. They began as an “auditory hallucination” (1967, 303) Ginsberg experienced while simultaneously masturbating—a typical Ginsbergian detail—and reading Blake's “Sun-flower” (Exhibit 3). However hallucinated his hearing may have been, or however adolescent his sexuality, his reading of Blake's poem demonstrates mature intelligence. While strongly identifying with the innocent desire for “a sweet golden clime,” he is able to criticize that desire and redirect it by repositioning himself in relation to it. This is the sort of reading “Ah! Sun-flower” seems to be designed to elicit (Bloom 1963, 139-40).

In Blake's view, natural desire is cyclical, like “the steps of the sun,” because, like the sunflower, it is “vegetated,” a term Blake used in other contexts to mean “bound by natural law.” Human desire is truly progressive, Blake believed, only when the distinctively human condition of freedom from law is recognized. The proper setting for that freedom is not the garden, where the sunflower grows, but rather the city, where the Lamb of God presides.¹ Urban and pastoral imagery thus combine in Blake's later work to depict a higher, or “organized,” innocence (Lincoln 1995, 192, 200-11), as Jerusalem and Eden combine in this description of the Lamb in “Night the Eighth” of The Four Zoas:

He stood in fair Jerusalem to awake up into Eden
The fallen Man but first to Give his vegetated body
To be cut off & separated that the Spiritual body
          may be Reveald.

(Blake 1970, 363)

Ginsberg experienced such an awakening through his reading of “Ah! Sun-flower” in 1948: “my body suddenly felt light … it was a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I'd been existing in” (1967, 304). His experience began with a recognition of his fallen state, “cut off from what I'd idealized romantically” (1967, 302), and thus already a step ahead of Blake's Youth and Virgin, who feel cut off, but show no awareness that the “sweet golden clime” to which they aspire is a romantic idealization. To the extent that that awareness is in the poem, it can only belong to Blake himself—hence Ginsberg's hallucination of actually hearing Blake's voice. The next step was to see with Blake's eyes. Having turned his gaze from an illusory paradise “elsewhere,” Ginsberg was prepared to see the reality in front of him: “I suddenly realized that this existence was it!” (1967, 303). But “it,” in this statement, refers to “the sweet golden clime,” now relocated. In other words, Ginsberg is claiming that, like the fallen Man awakened by the Lamb in Blake's Four Zoas, he has awakened into Eden as a present reality. However, since his present reality, in non-visionary terms, is East Harlem, he envisions Eden in urban form, as the New Jerusalem.

Needless to say, finding imagery that can communicate a view of East Harlem as the New Jerusalem poses a considerable challenge, so it is not surprising to find Ginsberg struggling toward that imagery, even as late as the 1965 interview that I have been drawing on for his recollection of his Blake visions. In that recollection, Ginsberg first overlooks the city altogether: “looking out at the window, through the window at the sky, suddenly it seemed that I saw into the depths of the universe, by looking simply into the ancient sky. The sky suddenly seemed very ancient. And this was the very ancient place that he [Blake] was talking about, the sweet golden clime, I suddenly realized that this existence was it” (1967, 302). Despite Ginsberg's emphasis on the immediate presence of “this existence,” the temptation to displace Edenic reality “elsewhere,” which Blake criticizes in “Ah! Sun-flower,” is still evident in Ginsberg's description, in both its spatial (up there in the sky) and temporal (“very ancient”) detail. Nevertheless, a connection between this “ancient sky” and Ginsberg's sense of having heard the voice of “the Ancient of Days,” a Creator figure (1967, 303),² suggests that Ginsberg is trying to humanize the sky by depicting it not merely as a natural phenomenon but as a product of art, something created. The Blakean analogue here is the imaginative reclaiming of the world of experience at the end of Milton, Book 1: “The Sky is an immortal Tent built by the Sons of Los” (Blake 1970, 126).

Blake's own imagery becomes more humanized in his last epic, Jerusalem, where the buildings he depicts are not merely figurative, like the sky, but actual, like those of London, though they are re-envisioned as “Labour of merciful hands” to pre-figure the arrival of the New Jerusalem (Blake 1970, 154). In Ginsberg's second attempt to describe what he saw when he looked out of his window in Harlem, the buildings come into focus as the “solidification” of human imagination, a City of Art after the manner of Blake's Jerusalem (Bloom 1963, 380). “What I was speaking about visually, Ginsberg resumes,

was, immediately, that the cornices in the old tenement building in Harlem across the back-yard court had been carved very finely in 1890 or 1910. And were like the solidification of a great deal of intelligence and care and love also. So that I began noticing in every corner where I looked evidences of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. Some hand placed them there—that some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me.

(Ginsberg 1967, 304)

There is still some displacement in this vision. Ginsberg is seeing the buildings as they were conceived “in 1890 or 1910,” not as they appeared to the ordinary eye in 1948, when his vision occurred, or in 1965, when he recollects it. Some of the pastoral mood, therefore, may be due to nostalgia, but a much larger part must be credited to the sensation of being at one with the environment. Most important, that sense of oneness is achieved through identification not with nature's creatures, like “The Lamb” of Blake's Songs of Innocence, but rather with the Creator, in the person of the Son, the Lamb of God. In his own words, Ginsberg had experienced “this vision or this consciousness, of being alive unto myself, alive myself unto the Creator. As the son of the Creator—who loved me, I realized, or who responded to my desire, say. It was the same desire both ways” (1967, 303).

In his effort to emphasize the closeness of his identification with the Creator, Ginsberg moves toward traditional pastoral, but away from Blake. As he speaks, Ginsberg progressively revises his claim to have seen evidence of the Creator's hand, and claims instead to be in the immediate presence of the Creator: “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” (1967, 304). With the erasure of the creating hand, any impression of the “terrible eternal labour” (Blake 1970, 154) Blake thought necessary to build the New Jerusalem has also been erased. For Ginsberg, who upholds the classical ideal of otium, as we have seen, pastoral is defined by the absence of labor. Beulah, a place of temporary rest for Blake (1970, 299; Lincoln 1995, 201), is for Ginsberg “the Great Place” itself (“Falling Asleep in America” 1984, 517). “Jerusalem pillars” are not to be built with the hand but seen with the eye, as shafts of sunlight play upon a windowpane at a rural retreat (“Easter Sunday” 1984, 516).

This attitude extends to the making of verse, the one activity that might appear as labor that Ginsberg, again following classical tradition, admits into his pastoral world. After all, the songs of classical pastoral are sung while the shepherds are resting from their labor as shepherds. Because we never see a shepherd working to compose his song, it appears to arise spontaneously, as both Blake and Ginsberg believed true poetry should arise (Ginsberg 1984, xx, 595). But Ginsberg is confident that it is true poetry as soon as it arises—“first thought, best thought” (1984, xx)—whereas Blake distrusts any material that has not been carefully worked over by hand, as his laborious method of printing his books implies.

THE AMERICAN TRADITION

Although I have just measured the divergence between Blake and Ginsberg by the standards of classical pastoral, I do not mean to suggest that the divergence was caused by any observance of classical standards on Ginsberg's part. Rather, the voice of Blake takes on an American accent in Ginsberg's East Harlem apartment because Ginsberg had been training himself in that distinctively American tradition of urban pastoral sketched by Helen Vendler (1990, 245) and traced through the nineteenth century by James Machor (1987). Whitman's view of the city assigns the same privilege to the observer's eye over the laborer's hand that we have seen in Ginsberg's vision of Harlem:

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

(Whitman, “A Song for Occupations” 1968, 215)

In a letter sent to William Carlos Williams in 1956, Ginsberg confessed to “a whitmanesque mania & nostalgia for cities” (Williams 1992, 210), recalling his own nostalgic transformation of Harlem into the city of “1890 or 1910,” and recalling also, at least to the readers of William's long city poem, Paterson, a particularly “pastoral” evocation of the early years of that city in Book 4 (Riddel 1974, 94-97), into which Williams had inserted another letter from Ginsberg (Paterson 4 [1951]; Williams 1992, 193).

The version of pastoral that Ginsberg derived from Williams is as much a mode of activity as of imagery. If Blake went beyond pastoral in his insistence on “terrible eternal labour,” Williams reaffirms pastoral in his idealization of laborers at rest. Like the singing of the idle shepherds in classical pastoral, their resting signifies the work of the artist as a kind of non-activity, a point that Williams sometimes underscores by explicitly drawing his models from works of art: the “Heavenly man” of Paterson 2 (1948) from an Eisenstein film (Williams 1992, 57-58), or the “young / reaper enjoying his / noonday rest” among the Pictures from Brueghel (Williams 1988, 389). More pertinent to urban pastoral, because their work is industrial rather than agricultural, are the roofers of “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” (1936; Williams 1986, 405-406). According to Williams, this poem “is really telling about my struggle with verse” (Williams 1978, 57). Though the term “struggle” hardly seems to apply to the roofers, “resting / in the fleckless light” during the last moments of their lunch hour, we can get some idea of what Williams means if we approach his poem by way of Whitman, and look for the work of the eye rather than the hand. Thus, the poet's work, the effort to see with precision, is revealed in the final image of Williams's poem, as one of the roofers,

                                                  still chewing
picks up a copper strip
and runs his eye along it

This is the work that Ginsberg represents in “The Bricklayer's Lunch Hour,” one of the poems that Ginsberg “discovered” when Williams told him some of the prose passages in his journals already were poems.³ “The Bricklayer's Lunch Hour” seems to derive directly from “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper,” except that Ginsberg's bricklayer, “gazing uninterestedly,” is as idle of eye as he is of hand. In this case, the resting laborer offers a contrast to the poet, whose eye is felt to engage each detail of this scene observed “on a shady street in Denver.” Because the poem consists of nothing but details, without interpretive commentary, its mood seems very different from Ginsberg's apocalyptic visions of Harlem, with its “buildings standing in Eternity” (Ginsberg 1984, 595). But to Ginsberg, the scene in Denver still offers “a little shiver of eternal space” (Ginsberg quoted in Schumacher 1992, 81), because fixing the eye on “minute particulars”—a concern for Blake (e.g., Blake 1970, 249) as much as for Williams (Williams 1992, 5), as Ginsberg knew (Breslin 1985, 90)—produces the impression of stopping time.

Having trained his eye in this discipline, Ginsberg was predisposed to see New York through Frank O'Hara's eyes, though in a way that we might not at first associate with O'Hara, and certainly not with pastoral. If the defining moment of pastoral is the moment of rest, such as we have just examined in Williams and Ginsberg, O'Hara's mode, in contrast, is characterized by the impression of speed. “If we contrast O'Hara with Williams,” James Breslin argues, “we see how steadfastly O'Hara refused to eternalize his objects”; “they go by too quickly to yield meanings,” Breslin elaborates (Breslin 1985, 218, 217). Nevertheless, the objects that speed by O'Hara's gaze frequently converge on a “resting/center,” as Williams referred to the young reaper in Brueghel's painting (1988, 390), and that point implies a meaning, more often than not having something to do with mortality. The paradigm is “A Step Away from Them” (1956; O'Hara 1995, 257-58), the occasion for Breslin's comments quoted above, and, I believe, the poem that initiated Ginsberg into O'Hara's way of seeing the city. Like the poems by Williams and Ginsberg we have just been considering, O'Hara's poem is set during lunch hour, but the pace of observation hardly seems leisurely, an impression heightened by the sudden shifts among the sights observed: women on the sidewalk, taxis in the street, watches in shop windows, “cats playing in sawdust.” Then abruptly, at the center of the poem, “Everything / suddenly honks,” and things grind to a halt, however briefly.

Ginsberg recalls this “honking” both in “My Sad Self” (1958; Ginsberg 1984, 202), which is dedicated to O'Hara, and in “City Midnight Junk Strains” (1966; Ginsberg 1984, 459), his elegy for O'Hara. The elegiac mood already present in “My Sad Self,” as the title implies, may well recall O'Hara's lament for the passing of friends to which he turns after the “honking” moment in “A Step Away from Them.” That moment itself extends into eternity in Ginsberg's poem:

                                                  … all movement stops
& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
                    tenderness flowing thru the buildings

No doubt Breslin would argue that Ginsberg here proves to be more conventional than O'Hara by restoring what O'Hara was bold enough to do without, the “eternal perspective” in which “thoughts of time and loss” are traditionally “reconciled” (1985, 219). In my view, however, Ginsberg's lines display nothing so fixed as a perspective, but rather a mood holding in fluid suspension two emotions, not thoughts: namely, tenderness and sadness.

This is the mood of pastoral elegy, famously defined by Erwin Panofsky as “that vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquillity which is perhaps Virgil's most personal contribution to poetry” (1955, 300). In the later English tradition, it descends by way of Shelley rather than Blake. Its arrival in America, by way of Whitman, prepares the ground on which Ginsberg, who quoted Shelley's “Adonais” in the epigraph to “Kaddish” (1959), meets O'Hara, who was too urbane to take seriously Ginsberg's “Blakean mysticism,” as James Breslin calls it (1985, 220). Urbanity is a quality not often ascribed to Ginsberg, but it belongs to the complex mood of urban pastoral. Thus, it can be sensed in Ginsberg's ironic comparison of himself, “poking around big history-less Mayan ruins” in the mountains of Mexico, with “Shelley in Italy” (quoted in Kramer 1969, 40), presumably in the act of naturalizing the ruins of Rome by comparing them to “shattered mountains,” as he does in “Adonais” (Shelley 1970, 442). O'Hara applies the same principle of comparison but in the opposite direction, from the mountains to the city, when he claims that the sort of “insight into nature” once offered by “the hills outside Rome” is now more likely to be found in the sight of “a woman stepping on a bus” (1954; O'Hara 1975, 42). Observing that “nature has not stood still since Shelley's day,” O'Hara argues that technology, in both its scientific and artistic extensions, has made all of nature into a human construct. The ancient division between city and country, a defining feature of traditional pastoral, has been erased.

ECOLOGUES

O'Hara's redefinition of nature provides a useful clue to understanding one of the most significant yet also most puzzling expressions of Ginsberg's urban pastoral, the sequence of “Ecologues of These States 1969-1971” that continues an even longer “Poem of These States” that Ginsberg had begun in 1965.⁴ Although Ginsberg's classifying term alludes directly to Virgil's eclogues, it is easy to take the term as wholly ironical, since Ginsberg's “ecologues” invert the “sweet golden clime” of Blake's “Sun-flower” into imagery of ecological disaster:

Philadelphia smoking in Gold Sunlight, pink blue
                    green Cyanide tanks sitting on hell's floor,
Many chimneys smoldering, city flats virus-linked
                    along Delaware bays under horizon-smog—

(Ginsberg 1984, 514)

However, Ginsberg has been granted this particular vision by going up in an airplane. On the whole, his “Poem of These States” celebrates modern means of transportation, which he took pains to represent in their full range (Schumacher 1992, 475), as much as it condemns industrial pollution. If “the machine in the garden,” as Leo Marx established (1964), represents the tension between pastoralism and industrialism in America, Ginsberg enters the garden riding on the machine.⁵

Of all the modern extensions of technology, those of transportation and communication, which also feature prominently in Ginsberg's imagery, have done the most to erase the boundary between city and country and establish the new sense of nature-as-artifice observed by Frank O'Hara. In that sense, Ginsberg appears as natural as O'Hara's “woman stepping on a bus,” as Ginsberg does to survey America in the second section of “Iron Horse” (1984, 449-56), or to work among “the poor shepherds” “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound” (1956), an earlier poem (1984, 153-54). The outstanding example of communications technology employed in the work of the sixties is the tape machine on which Ginsberg recorded his impressions as he rode along in an automobile, producing what he called “auto poesy”: poetry as “automatic” as that proposed by the surrealists, or as spontaneous as the songs of the shepherds in classical pastoral.

Having thus “pastoralized” certain aspects of industrial production, Ginsberg occupies a middle position from which he satirizes traditional pastoral ideals as well as industrial pollution. It is typical of urban pastoral to reject the traditional ideal of “the return to nature” as a refuge from city problems: “the country will bring us / no peace,” says Williams (1988, 88-89]; “the country is no good for us,” echoes O'Hara (1995, 476). Ginsberg makes himself the object of such critique in “Ecologue,” the only poem specifically so titled, and the one poem in the group of “Ecologues of These States” that most clearly employs the title term ironically. Identifying Virgil's eclogues as the poetry of a civilization's end, when “life on a farm” seemed “safer, healthier” than in “garbage-filled Rome” (1984, 545), Ginsberg describes a farm he purchased in 1968 in Cherry Valley, New York, 200 miles from New York City's “suffering millions” (1984, 544). Retreating to the farm does not permit him to escape suffering, however. It is not just that he is pursued by news of the outside world, the war in Vietnam and the domestic war to enforce state control of drugs, but in the daily life of the farm itself, broken bodies and run-down machinery serve as a constant reminder of both individual mortality and universal entropy. The dream of a “safer, healthier” place is exposed as an illusion: “The Farm's a lie!” (1984, 547). At the conclusion of “Ecologue,” farmer Ginsberg stares in mock-horror—that is, with the mockery turned on himself—at “bottles & cans piled up in our garbage pail” (1984, 552), just as in “garbage-filled Rome.”

There are many poems in which Ginsberg himself asks the question I asked at the outset, “What does Allen Ginsberg want?” “Ecologue,” read as part of the larger “Poem of These States,” demonstrates how the topic of pastoral enables the poet to refine that question into a critique of desire. The “States” that Ginsberg is exploring, as he makes clear in his cover blurb for The Fall of America, are as much “States of consciousness” as they are political entities (1984, 815). What spoils the pastoral dream for farmer Ginsberg is that he has entered the state of possession by actually purchasing a farm, “buying into” a deception as if it were a reality. “Dangerous to want possessions,” Ginsberg reminds himself in “Iron Horse,” as he contemplates a newspaper ad for “113 acres / of woodland” (1984, 454). A series of quotations from one of Ginsberg's gurus toward the end of “Iron Horse” points to the alternative of total dispossession, rejection of all images, those of poetry as well as those of war, and even that of the self, in favor of “pure Consciousness”: “Buddha's Nameless / Alone is Alone” (1984, 455-56).

This ideal is the key to “Wales Visitation,” a text that is unique within the “Poem of These States,” and indeed within Ginsberg's total oeuvre, because it is almost pure pastoral in the traditional sense and apparently without irony. Although it invokes both Blake and Wordsworth by name, it pretends to reject even the name of Ginsberg, who has been exposed as mere image through “TV pictures flashing bearded your Self” (1984, 480). In place of that personal illusion, the poem assumes the voice of a “Bard Nameless as the Vast.” The pastoral imagery that follows this assumption is very beautiful and has received much praise from critics (e.g., Moramarco 1982, 13-14; Schumacher 1992, 486-88), but it is no less a lie than the dream of the farm that Ginsberg mocks in “Ecologue.” In fact, it is a worse lie, since in “Wales Visitation” Ginsberg is lying to himself. By the terms he acknowledges in “Iron Horse,” the Nameless condition he assumes at the beginning of “Wales Visitation” could be followed by no images, pastoral or otherwise. It is not the Bard who achieves the Nameless condition, but the Saint.

“Iron Horse” is a more honest poem than “Wales Visitation” because, while it honors the Saint's path toward the Nameless, it recognizes the divergence of the Bard's path and commits Ginsberg to it and to his ordinary self, as he returns by Greyhound bus to his home in the city at the poem's end. By naming the city “Mannahatta,” Ginsberg acknowledges Whitman as the Bard whose path he is following (1984, 456 and n. 782). O'Hara is not far away, in the poem that immediately follows “Iron Horse” in the arrangement of the Collected Poems, where Ginsberg says, “I see New York thru your eyes.” We can hear an echo of O'Hara in the casual notation of desire at the conclusion of “Iron Horse”—“taxi-honk toward East River where / Peter waits working” (1984, 456). Earlier in the poem, we can see the influence of Williams in the precise observation of particulars that discovers beauty in the industrial landscape Ginsberg passes through on his way to New York:

Brilliant green lights
                    in factory transom windows.
                                                                      Beautiful!

(Ginsberg 1984, 452)⁶

However, when Ginsberg sees through these particulars to open a series of challenging questions, he is seeing through Blake's eyes:

Why do I fear these lights?
          & smoking chimneys' Industry?
          Why see them less godly
                                                                                than forest treetrunks
                                                                                & sunset orange moons?
          Why these cranes less Edenly than Palmfronds?

(Ginsberg 1984, 453)

These questions go to the heart of Ginsberg's urban pastoral. His ability to see even the possibility of equating “smoking chimneys” and “forest treetrunks” shows that he has left behind the state of innocence parodied in “Ecologue” and, more gently, within “Iron Horse” itself. As he resists the invitation to purchase the “113 acres / of woodland” offered for sale in the newspaper, Ginsberg acknowledges:

In my twenties I would've enjoyed running around these green woods naked.
In my twenties I would've enjoyed making love naked by these brooks

(Ginsberg 1984, 454)

—but no longer. He has seen death, he has fallen from innocence, and having fallen into “experience,” as Blake called it, Ginsberg has progressed to the knowledge not only that “The Farm's a lie,” as he declares in “Ecologue,” but that “All landscapes have become Phantom,” as he concludes in “Iron Horse” (1984, 455).

Ginsberg does not mean to deny that industry can be genuinely destructive any more than Blake would deny that the “marks of woe” he perceived in “London” were genuinely felt (1970, 26). From the standpoint of experience, Ginsberg knows there is good reason to fear the factory more than the forest: “my countrymen make this structure to make War” (1984, 453). But because war is “made,” the landscape it produces is a Phantom—a fiction, something made—as much as any landscape, including the natural one. All landscapes ultimately reflect a state of consciousness (Schama 1995); they are “mind-forg'd,” as Blake would say (1970, 27). But only those states that deny having been made, that present themselves as an unconditional reality, are “forged” in the sense of being “lies,” like Ginsberg's farm in “Ecologue,” or like war in “Iron Horse”:

all screaming of soldiers
                                                  crying on wars
speech politics massing armies
                                                  is false-feigning show

(Ginsberg 1984, 456)

Although this sounds like the guru's too easy dismissal of the phenomenal world as mere “Appearances” (Ginsberg 1984, 455), Ginsberg's simultaneous acknowledgment of the real suffering that Appearances entail suggests that his deeper source is Blake. You “are led to Believe a Lie,” Blake warned, “When you see with not thro the Eye” (1970, 484, 512),⁷ precisely the diagnosis that Ginsberg assigns to the diseased state of consciousness he calls “war.” War's ecological consequence is, so to speak, an inability to see the forest for the lies. However, seen through the eye of Blake's higher, organized innocence, the trees of the forest reappear as having been made, like the rest of the phenomenal world. Thus, Ginsberg's vision of the “spiritual labor” (1967, 306) that produced the buildings of Harlem reappears in “Iron Horse” in the equation of urban pastoral:

                    all these places millions of trees' work
                                                  made green
as millions of workmens' labor raised the buildings of NY

(Ginsberg 1984, 454)

Notes

1. For the interrelationship of garden and city in Blake's image of Paradise, see Frye (1975, 62), Bloom (1963, 37), and Mitchell (1978, 167).

2. The redeeming connotations of “the Ancient of Days” in Ginsberg are those of the original figure in the Book of Daniel (7:9-22) rather than in Blake's threatening image, used as the frontispiece to Europe, that critics sometimes refer to as “the Ancient of Days.”

3. See Breslin (1985, 89) for Williams on Ginsberg's journals in general; Breslin (1985, 92) for mention of this poem in particular in the context of a “pastoral” tendency in Ginsberg at this time. In Ginsberg (1984, 4) the poem is dated “Denver, Summer 1947,” and it appears in verse lineation, but it was first published in the New Directions annual for 1953 (Ginsberg 1953) in prose form.

4. The bulk of the sequence was published in The Fall of America (1973) but it was expanded in the Collected Poems (Ginsberg 1984) through the significant addition of “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” “Iron Horse” and “Wales Visitation.”

5. See Marx (1964, 218) for reference to the Beats. In contrast to my emphasis, Marx himself uses a statement by Ginsberg in an interview to categorize his version of pastoral as naive (1988, 199-200). In the poems, Ginsberg's pastoral is usually more complex. Compare Moramarco (1982, 16).

6. Ginsberg's use of the 3-step line also suggests the influence of Williams in this instance.

7. My quotation conflates the wording of similar passages from “Auguries of Innocence” and “The Everlasting Gospel” as Ginsberg does (1967, 296).

Works Cited

Alpers, Paul. 1996. What Is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Blake, William. 1970. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. Garden City: Doubleday.

Bloom, Harold. 1963. Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Garden City: Doubleday.

Breslin, James E. B. 1985. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eagleton, Terry. 1986. “The Critic as Clown.” In Against the Grain: Essays 1975-85. London, Verso.

Empson, William. 1974. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions.

Frye, Northrop. 1975. “Blake's Treatment of the Archetype.” In English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M. H. Abrams. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ginsberg, Allen. 1953. “The Bricklayer's Lunch Hour.” New Directions in Prose and Poetry 14:342.

———. 1967. Interview by Thomas Clark. Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews. 3rd Series. New York: Viking.

———. 1977. “Allen Ginsberg Talks About Poetry.” Interview by Kenneth Koch. New York Times Book Review, 23 October: 9+.

———. 1984. Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York: Harper and Row.

———. 1994. “Notes for Howl and Other Poems.” In Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover. New York: Norton.

Kramer, Jane. 1969. Allen Ginsberg in America. New York: Random House.

Lincoln, Andrew. 1995. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake's “Vala” or “The Four Zoas.” Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Machor, James L. 1987. Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 1988. “American Literary Culture and the Fatalistic View of Technology.” In The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 1978. Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moramarco, Fred. 1982. “Moloch's Poet: A Retrospective Look at Allen Ginsberg's Poetry.” American Poetry Review 11.5 (September-October): 10-18.

O'Hara, Frank. 1975. “Nature and New Painting.” In Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox.

———. 1995. The Collected Poems. Ed. Donald Allen. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Panofsky, Erwin. 1955. “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition.” In Meaning in the Visual Arts. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Patterson, Annabel. 1987. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Riddel, Joseph. 1974. The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York: Knopf.

Schumacher, Michael. 1992. Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Shelley, P. B. 1970. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson and G. M. Matthews. London: Oxford University Press.

Snyder, Gary. 1985. “Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique.” In Poetry and Politics: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Richard Jones. New York: Quill.

Vendler, Helen. 1990. “Frank O'Hara: The Virtue of the Alterable.” In Frank O'Hara: To Be True to a City, ed. Jim Elledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Whitman, Walt. 1968. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: Norton.

Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williams, William Carlos. 1978. I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet. Ed. Edith Heal. New York: New Directions.

———. 1986. Collected Poems 1: 1909-1939. Ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions.

———. 1988. Collected Poems 2: 1939-1962. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions.

———. 1992. Paterson. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions.