Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg - (June 3, 1926 April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the
leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon
would follow. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression.

He was admitted to Columbia University, and as a student there in the 1940s,

he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack
Kerouac, all of whom later became leading figures of the Beat movement. The
group led Ginsberg to a New Vision," which he defined in his journal: Since art
is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the
most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true
expression and the true art.

On April 5, 1997, in New York City, he died from complications of hepatitis.

AMERICA:

Analysis

Lines 1 - 16
The poem's first stanza is somewhat of an introduction that sets the time and context
for the poem. The first line sets an exhausted and depressed mood for the poem.
Ginsberg expresses his own hopelessness that his life or work, or anyone's life, would
mean anything within a culture of censorship and oppression. He laments the cultural
poverty of the time, equating it to only a few dollars and cents, and finds that he is not
even able to be himself in such a culture.
The following lines of the poem start Ginsberg's conversation with this personified
America. He is partly dissatisfied with the militarism of the country and he tells
America to "go fuck yourself with your atom bomb" (5). He wants to stop the
conversation before it even starts, making excuses that he doesn't want to be bothered
with such a conversation (ignoring that he was the one who started it) and declaring
that he won't write until "I'm in my right mind" (7). But as he noted before, he will
never be in his right mind. He cannot stand his mind.
The stanza then turns into a kind of angry lament. These lines make America seem like
a lost lover, someone that Ginsberg once loved and saw great promise and potential in;
it was a potential for salvation. Ginsberg is perhaps remembering the great promise
that America offered his own family as immigrant to the land. He asks when America
will once again become the land that it once promised to be. When will it become
"angelic" (8), when will it see the death and destruction that it has caused, when will it
understand that its own political oppression is greater than the political oppression of

the "Trotskyites" (communists) that it denounces and goes to war with (11)? Ginsberg
laments that the libraries of America, representing the potential of free information and
free expression, are "full of tears" (12), and he denounces the corporatism of American
life symbolized by "the supermarket" and how those with "good looks" are given easy
entry into American wealth (15-16).

http://www.shmoop.com/america-ginsberg/analysis.html
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/allen-ginsberg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orar-V3y5Sk
http://www.gradesaver.com/allen-ginsbergs-poetry/study-guide/section6/