Post WWII: Allen Ginsberg

"Howl"

• Inspired by Kerouac's spontaneous composition
• Common themes:
• angry rant, futility
• religion: Jewish, Christian, Buddhist (Moloch, Jesus, Buddha, Angel)
• Explicit imagery: homosexuality, heterosexuality, genitals, drug use
• Condemning: people, government, industry, society
• Time/eternity
• War imagery
• Neal Cassady
• Jack
• Burroughs
• Carl Solomon
• Madness
• Nakedness
• Poetics (craft of poetry)
• Mother
• "Howl" began in 1954 when Ginsberg was high on peyote and saw SF skyline transform into an evil monster (moloch)
• First read in public Oct 7, 1955 at Six Gallery
• Published in November 1956 by City lights
• Ferlinghett: city lights owner, and Shigeyoshi murao, manger, arrested for disturbing obscene materials. Later, judge stated that the poem had social importance
• Some influences on "Howl"
• Hospitalized in mental hospital after arrested for storing stolen goods for friends
• experienced depression, loneliness, concerned he was insane, confusion about sexual identity
• Carl Solomon - met Solomon in mental hospital where he stayed 7 months. 
• Solomon was eccentric & intellectual, interested in surrealist & Dadaism art movements. Like Ginsberg, he had suicidal thoughts while hospitalized
• Ginsberg's mother Naomi, suffered severe mental illness and attempted suicides. She was in/out of hospitals all his life
• William Carlos Williams, older Modernist poet, befriended Ginsberg & advised him to use concrete imagery & use everyday speech. Encouraged Ginsberg to move away from form, meter, & rhyme
• William Blake influenced Ginsberg's sense that poetry can convey mystical, visionary material
• Christopher Smart - Ginsberg was inspired by the sound & rhyme of Smart's long line and anaphora
• Walt Whitman influenced Ginsberg's use of long line & rhyme & sound of the long line. Whitman was also an influence in terms of subject matter, as a poet who openly wrote about sexuality, the connection between the cosmic realm & the lowly details of everyday life, about the spiritual connection of all aspects of experience, etc.

Summarizing structure of "Howl"

• Part I: Crossing American (and world) with social outcasts, rebels. Despondent but ecstatic tone, embracing the energy of rebelliousness, despair, & madness
• Part II: Mythical space, but also the space of modern industrial, commercial, Urban America. Moral Outage at American culture
• Part III: Setting is a specific mental institution with one ind. person compassion, sense of connection, & solidarity between 2 people

Analysis: Part I

• Best minds destroyed - addictions controlling them; self-destroyed (old) in order for new to be created
• Burning - yearning for; consumed by
• Dynamo - Machine creating energy; energetic people
• Arkansas replaces anarchy because anarchy is too abstract with a better "thing-name" 
• Page 12 - Plotinus developed Plato's idea of the ideal
• St. John developed idea of suffering, decline of individual self to meet God
• Ginsberg is equating newer writers/thinkers with older ones - newer ones that his generation would definitely know: Bop, Poe with older ones: Plotinus, St. John - gnostic belief here
• Pg 13 - Ginsberg grew up in politically charged home. His parents were communists. Handed out pamphlets as a child
• Pg. 20 - My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
• Ginsberg (and the others0 takes all of the experiences, emotions, and forms them into writing.

Analysis: Part II

• Pg. 21 - Sphinx - guardian - no one could pass with without solving riddle
• Modern day, breaks open skulls, eats brains and imaginations
• Calls modern day sphinx "Moloch." the killer of Children
• Moloch section moves from physical to spiritual
• Good comps oint to make: structure
• appears that everyone survived & escaped - water (flood) is cleansing - last 2 stanzas/lines
• however, Ginsberg calls/refers to "the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit"
• "ten years" refers to the beat generation

Analysis: Part III

• referring to Solomon in the mental institution
• a lot of American imagery
• "Star-Spangled"
• "United States"
• "America"
• 2nd to last stanza - electrified awake out of a coma - soul is now free
• War imagery
• oxymorons everywhere: angelic bombs; electrified (scary or excited?)
• Echoing T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland" with the word "Rockland"?
• "A supermarket in California" pg 29
• Self-conscious =  self-aware?
• fruit - derogatory slang for gay men
• husbands... wives... could be a possible remark about available prostitutes
• may be saying they're out of place (as families) since he's gay and not his perception of a family
• Portrays Whitman as an old, lonely man
• eyeing the grocery boys (gay tendencies)
• "poking" among the meats
• Ginsberg "wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans" (cans=rear ends)
• Traveling imagery (pg 30)
• "love" for Ginsberg often meant affection between two people, not just sex, many times between men
• Whitman = poet of democracy, of all people according to Ginsberg
• Father figure for Ginsberg
• desire for connection with Whitman, returning to a cottage
• Written on the 100th Anniversary of "Leaves of Grass"
• "Sunflower Sutra," (p 35)
• "sutra"=lesson, usually spiritual
• Thesis/lesson - everyone is beautiful, regardless of outward appearance
• new idea in Ginsberg's time - his era was about conformity and playing your designated role
• Surroundings don't define you
• "Kaddish," (p 77 PBR)
• Ginsberg upset there weren't 10 Jewish men to perform the Kaddish as required
• This poem attempts to atone for that.
• apocalypse - cold war/nuclear war threat; emotional destruction; mortality & end of own life with loss of parent
• earthly existence, reincarnation, pg 78.

Uses of concrete names to discuss abstract concept
Spontaneous prose
Sect I

• Madness
• Rebellion
• Religion
• Eclectic
• outsider figures
• travel
• Nakedness

Sect II

• Corruption
• Cities
• Soullessness
• cities as monsters
• capitalism
• war
• industry

Sect III

• Carl Solomon
• Rockland
• Mother
• Connection between people
• Empathy
• Nakedness