Allen Ginsberg Irreverent Reverential and Apocalyptic American Poet

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JONAH RASKIN
Allen Ginsberg: Irreverent, Reverential,

and Apocalyptic American Poet
In Allen Ginsberg’s exuberant, electrifying brand of iconoclastic poetry,

uncertainties rival assurances, self-doubts clash with self-confidences, and
emotional paradoxes multiply. Walt Whitman’s rhetorical question in “Song
of Myself” (“Do I contradict myself?”) resonated with Ginsberg, as did John
Keats’s notion of “negative capability” – the ability to hold “opposite, con-
tradictory thoughts . . . without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.”1
Between shrill argument on the one hand, and a quiet quest for Buddhist
enlightenment on the other, Ginsberg walked a fine line. If he didn’t fulfill
his youthful dream of making poetry after World War II as distinctive as
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams made it after World
War I, he rejuvenated American poetry by experimenting with language and
with form. In several long works – “Howl” (1956), “Kaddish” (1959), and
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966) – and in a dozen or so shorter, carefully
crafted works – among them “Sunflower Sutra,” “A Strange New Cottage
in Berkeley,” “America,” “To Aunt Rose,” and “Autumn Leaves” – he com-
bined the irreverent, the reverential, and the apocalyptic and expanded the
house of poetry.
After his death, critics were unsure whether Ginsberg was a major poet, a
minor poet, or a major minor. Moreover, few critics could agree which poems
were his best poems. Still, he was certainly a looming cultural figure linking
modernists to post-modernists, hipsters to hippies, and the imagists of his
father’s era to the rappers of the 1990s. In a singular way, he bridged rival
camps in the culture of the Cold War and linked the “fellaheen” of Africa,
Asia, and Latin America with rebels in North America and with dissidents
such as Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Soviet Union.
Moreover, for more than forty years, he performed his work before exuberant
audiences and reinvented the poetry reading by breaking down the barriers
between poet and audience and by connecting the spoken word to live music.
Born in New Jersey to a Jewish family of artists, writers, and intellectu-
als, Ginsberg was influenced by parents who straddled bohemianism and
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Allen Ginsberg
radicalism. His mother, Naomi, who was born in Russia, was a painter and
a member of the Communist Party of the United States; his father, Louis – a
high school English teacher and a moderate socialist in his youth – wrote
poetry, self-published his work, and went into debt. Eugene, Allen’s older
brother, wrote poems and practiced law. Poetry was the “family business,”
and radical political causes its credo.
From his father, Allen learned firsthand to appreciate the craft of writing
and the pleasures of the spoken word, though he also rebelled against Louis
Ginsberg and his conventional brand of rhymed poetry and sought wilder
models. An eclectic array of poets, such as Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake,
and Carl Sandburg, were early cultural heroes, and in apprentice work that
he published in high school and in college he expressed his own loneli-
ness and communicated his vision of an apocalyptic age ushered in by the
atomic bomb.
At Columbia University, his teachers introduced him to the
seventeenth-century metaphysical poets and the twentieth-century modern-
ists, steering him away from romantics such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and
Walt Whitman, whom he admired in boyhood. In 1945, Columbia sus-
pended him for writing obscenities on the window of his dorm room and
for allowing Kerouac to sleep in his bed. In “Howl,” he refers obliquely to
the incident: “publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull.”2
Away from campus, he worked as a sailor, traveled to Africa, wrote fic-
tion, took up photography – a lifelong pursuit – and briefly thought he
might become a novelist in the manner of Thomas Mann and James Joyce
until Kerouac persuaded him to write about the local and the provincial
not the international and the cosmopolitan. In 1949, he was arrested as an
accomplice to a series of robberies; his professors arranged for him to be a
patient at the New York State Psychiatric Institute rather than serve prison
time. In psychoanalysis for half a year, he made friends with another patient,
Carl Solomon, who seemed in many ways his double: a rebellious Jewish
intellectual and a poet uncertain about himself who appears under his own
name in “Howl.”
As a poet, Ginsberg plunged bravely into the wreck of his own life and
the lives of those around him. He used drugs to stimulate his imagination
and wrote enthusiastically about marijuana, LSD, peyote, Methedrine, and
laughing gas – though unlike Coleridge he wrote no masterpiece, no “Kubla
Khan,” under the influence of drugs. “Mescaline” and “Lysergic Acid,” both
from 1959, illustrate the kind of talky, unspectacular work he did when he
used illicit substances. Indeed, he thrived on actualities and on the news of
current events. As a boy, he had read the New York Times and written poems
inspired by front-page stories about the rise of Fascism. An over-arching title
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for all his work might be Planet News, the title he gave to a collection of
poems published in 1968. Fascinated with the tranquilizing power of the
mass media, he wrote poetry and essays too about the numbing impact of
newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV in “Television Was a Baby Crawling
Toward that Deathchamber.”
In the 1940s and early 1950s, he wore a suit and tie and worked as a
market researcher in Manhattan while living a secret existence that he
recorded in his journals, where he was far more candid about himself
than he was in the polished poems he sent to magazine and book editors
for publication. Signs of originality appeared as early as the 1949 poem
“Paterson” – a forerunner of “Howl,” which emerged from his experience
at the New York State Psychiatric Institute – in which he tapped into his
angst and wrote, “I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to
Mexico, heroin dripping / in my veins” (CP 40). It was an exception to the
rule of derivative work.
Ginsberg’s self-appointed apprenticeship in poetry, which began in the
early 1940s, came to a crescendo in the mid-1950s when he moved from
New York to San Francisco, with a long detour through Cuba and Mexico
where he immersed himself in Latin cultures, Spanish language poets such
as Garcia Lorca, and the indigenous arts of the Americas. Everywhere he
found writers to emulate and literary traditions to embrace. From his own
wide reading, he cobbled together a self-sustaining body of global writers
far beyond the Eurocentric tradition that T. S. Eliot offered in his seminal
1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which had influenced sev-
eral generations of teachers and writers including Ginsberg himself.
In California, away from parents, teachers, and mentors, and in ther-
apy with Dr. Philip Hicks – a young psychiatrist who encouraged him to
accept his fluid sexual identity – Ginsberg found his voice, consciously
created a flamboyant persona, and cast himself as a performance poet.
His own evolution in California is reflected in “Love Poem on Theme
by Whitman,” “Over Kansas,” and the exuberant “Malest Cornifici Tuo
Catullo,” in which he wrote, “I’m Happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen’s /
finally made it” (CP 123). Briefly, he attended the University of California
at Berkeley and considered a career in academia, but his seminal experi-
ences were in literary circles off campus where he met young poets such
as Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and the
grand old man of northern California arts and letters, Kenneth Rexroth,
who brought him into his salon and whom he depicted in the short poem
“Scribble.”
In the 1950s, the San Francisco Bay Area was in cultural ferment; Ginsberg
added to the volatile mix and to the legend of “The San Francisco Poetry
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Renaissance,” as did Jack Kerouac, a mentor and surrogate older brother,

who urged Ginsberg to write poetry without rewriting in much the same
way that he imagined African-American musicians such as Charlie Parker
played jazz: without rehearsing, without a score or an organizing principle.
In the 1950s, improvisation and spontaneity were cultural rallying cries in
the rebellion against conformity. Ginsberg and Kerouac echoed the cries
and genuinely endorsed the idea. However, neither adhered in practice to
the theory they espoused. Not even Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) went
unrevised, as the Original Scroll edition of the novel written in 1951 and
published in 2007 amply shows.3
Ginsberg would insist that “Howl” was written on the spur of the moment,
without rational thinking. The original title for the poem was “Strophes.”
“Howl,” the title he finally selected for his work, as well as phrases in the
body of the work itself, such as “ten years’ animal screams” (CP 132), sug-
gest that he wanted it to be viewed as the cry of a wild beast or the rant of
a patient in a hospital for the insane. His notebooks belie his assertion that
“Howl” was an act of pure inspiration written without alteration. Ideas and
images that he jotted down in notebooks showed up in the first draft of Part
I of “Howl,” written in 1955, and were revised over a year’s time. Stanzas
and phrases were moved around to give the poem added coherence, and
individual words were amended.4
Soon after he finished the first draft of Part I of “Howl,” Ginsberg per-
formed it at “The 6,” an avant-garde San Francisco art gallery. Snyder,
Whalen, and Lamantia read their work; Kerouac cheered from the audi-
ence, supplied the red wine that was passed around and later chronicled the
watershed event in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958), in which Ginsberg
appears as the poet “Alva Goldbook.” (In On the Road, he’s “Carlo Marx.”)
Kerouac’s jabs at his friend notwithstanding, Ginsberg was the star of the
show. Kenneth Rexroth predicted “Howl” would make him nationally as
well as locally renowned, and even his normally reserved father raved about
his son’s stunning achievement. Before it was published, “Howl” elicited
attention from the media. The poet and critic Richard Eberhart wrote about
the performances of “Howl” for the New York Times in a September 2,
1956, article titled “West Coast Rhythms.” The author was no unschooled,
primitive poet as he claimed, Eberhart explained, but rather a serious stu-
dent of poetry who had served “years of apprentice” to develop his “brave
new medium.”
After performing Part I of “Howl” in public, Ginsberg wrote two more
sections under the influence of peyote, marijuana, and encouraged by his
own newly acquired sense of freedom. In Part II, he indicts “Moloch,” the
Old Testament deity to whom parents sacrifice their children, and Ginsberg’s
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Jonah Raskin
poetic version of what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower would call, as

he left office, “the military-industrial-complex.” Ginsberg’s Moloch begets
bombs, factories, prisons, and tombs, though even in this hellish world
heavenly beauty emerges. In Part III of “Howl,” Ginsberg turns playful and
even silly; “we hug and kiss the United Sates under our bedsheets,” he wrote
(CP 133).
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet in his own right and the founder and owner
of City Lights Bookstore – the first all-paperback store in the United States –
published “Howl” in the Pocket Poets Series, and, expecting that it would
be met with censorship, secured legal assistance from the American Civil
Liberties Union. William Carlos Williams provided an introduction in which
he confessed that he never thought that Ginsberg, whom he met as a young
man, would “grow up and write a book of poems.” Williams warned polite
readers, “we are going through hell.”5 Indeed, the poem descends into a psy-
chological inferno. The first edition of “Howl” and Other Poems was printed
in England in 1956 and shipped to San Francisco. Copies were seized and
then released by customs officials when the local district attorney declined
to prosecute. At seventy-five cents and small enough to fit into a pocket, the
book quickly became an underground classic passed from hand to hand
and also into the hands of the local police and from there to the desk of the
district attorney for the city of San Francisco who now eagerly brought an
indictment against Ferlinghetti, hoping to protect citizens against foul lan-
guage and indecent imagery.
The 1957 trial of “Howl” on charges of obscenity backfired for the pros-
ecution and made the poem famous and its author a celebrity. University of
California professors of English such as Mark Schorer testified brilliantly
for the defense and argued that “Howl” was a significant work of art. It
was a supreme moment for the critic and for literary criticism in America.
The trial accorded notoriety to Ferlinghetti and City Lights Bookstore. San
Francisco’s North Beach became a Mecca for “Beatniks,” as newspaper col-
umnist Herb Caen dubbed the young men and women who drank cappuc-
cinos, listened to jazz and poetry, smoked marijuana, and wore jeans and
T-shirts.
Ginsberg’s fans saw him as a latter-day Whitman and regarded “Howl”
as a successor to Leaves of Grass. The poem’s epigraph from Whitman –
“Unscrew the locks from the doors!” – encouraged the perception of
Ginsberg as Whitman’s literary descendant, as did Ginsberg’s 1955 poem,
“A Supermarket in California,” in which he describes Whitman as “dear
father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher” (HOP 30). Like Leaves of
Grass, “Howl” offers unrhymed poetry with long lines that spread across
the page and that were meant to look and sound like prose. Like Whitman,
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Ginsberg sang a “Song of Myself” at the same time that, like Whitman, he
addressed America and spoke for the nation as a whole. He took a similar
stance as the voice of the nation, albeit with slapstick humor, in the poem
“America” that contains the infamous line, “Go fuck yourself with your
atom bomb” (HOP 39).
What fans didn’t see or hear – and what Ginsberg no longer wanted to see
in his new incarnation as the prince of Beat poets – were the echoes of Eliot’s
The Waste Land with its apocalyptic images and grousing about civilization.
Electrifying phrases such as “hydrogen jukebox” and “drunken taxicabs of
Absolute Reality” bear little if any resemblance to Whitman’s diction (HOP
11, 16) but follow Eliot’s prescription, in “The Metaphysical Poets,” for
“amalgamating disparate experiences” and “telescoping of images.”6
Near the end of Part I, Ginsberg uses the image of “the total alphabet
soup of time” to describe the predicament in which his friend and fellow
medical patient, Carl Solomon, found himself as a sane man in an institution
for the insane. The soup image also serves as a metaphor for the poem itself
into which the author adds “tortillas,” “stale beer,” “cock and endless balls,”
“meat for the Synagogue,” “opium,” “lamb stew,” “crab,” “borsht,” “potato
salad,” and more. If Ginsberg saw himself as a jazz musician uttering “a sax-
ophone cry,” he also presented himself as a chef engaged in “wild cooking
pederasty and intoxication” (HOP 11–18).
In “Howl,” he mixed suicidal urges with sexual liberation, the sacred with
the profane. Not explicitly about childhood, the poem nonetheless expresses
a childlike sense of awe, terror, and beauty about the world. The demonic
Moloch in Part II is a child-like representation of a superhuman monster; the
individual human characters in the poem have child-like innocence. Based
on Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, and others, they appear thinly and not so
thinly disguised. Cassady is “N.C. secret hero of these poems” (HOP 14).
The real hero of “Howl,” however, isn’t an individual but a whole genera-
tion: the “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the / starry dynamo in the machinery of night” (HOP 9). Ginsberg added
that pivotal line when he revised the first draft to provide a sense of coher-
ence and to make the poem more than a mere cataloging of the bizarre, the
grotesque and the outrageous.
Ginsberg himself – or at least his persona – is the least secret hero in the
poem. He’s the “I” who appears in the first line, again in Part II in lines such
as “Moloch in whom I sit lonely!,” and finally in Part III where he addresses
Carl Solomon directly and chants the line “I’m with you in Rockland” that’s
repeated nineteen times (HOP 22, 24). Writing “Howl,” Ginsberg learned
the power of repetition. At the end of Part I, he depicts himself in the act of
writing the poem and recreating “the syntax and measure of poor human
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prose” (HOP 20). “Howl” describes its own genesis and evolution. It’s
an auto-telic and a post-modernist work that’s about itself and about its
author: the artist as a young madman, a persona that appealed to beatniks,
teens, and later to hippies who read “Howl” as a clarion call to rebel against
authority figures and to experiment with sex and drugs and to deviate from
social norms.
Ginsberg’s explosive poem arrived as a generation of Americans came
of age idolizing wild ones such as James Dean and Marlon Brando and
searching for literature that spoke to them and for them. “Howl” would
go on appealing to adolescents, teenagers, students, and their teachers, too,
for another two decades; fifty years after it was first published in the Pocket
Poets Series it had sold more than one million copies. Distinctly of its time
and place, it also looked backward to surrealism and the surrealists and
forward to the pop poetry of the counterculture. Though most of the scenes
in “Howl” were lifted from New York in the 1940s, the poem anticipated
the world that hippies and protestors would experience in the 1960s: the
horror of a seemingly unending war in Vietnam and the nightmare of urban
loneliness. Lines such as “Down to the river! into the street,” sounded like
invitations to a “be-in” or a riot (HOP 23). The image of the poet at rest
in his “cottage in the Western / night” presaged the pastoral dream of the
1960s utopians (HOP 26).
In the mid-1950s, spurred by the creative fallout from “Howl,” Ginsberg
wrote a series of poignant short poems, including “A Strange New Cottage
in Berkeley” (1955), which is one long, seemingly artless sentence. It’s a
carefully designed work, however, and shows how Ginsberg adapted a basic
tenet of modernism: Eliot’s notion of “the objective correlative,” which he
defined as “the only way to express emotion in the form of art.” Ginsberg
didn’t agree that the “objective correlative” was the only way a poet could
communicate sadness, anger, joy, and more. But he appreciated Eliot’s idea
that a poem could create an emotional response in the reader through “a set
of objects, a situation, a chain of events.”7 The point was not to tell readers
how or what to feel but to allow them to discover feelings in the process of
reading and rereading a poem.
“A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley” contains a dozen ordinary and yet
unusual objects and things both animate and inanimate: blackberries, string
beans, daisies, a fence, apricots, a coffeepot, a big tire, marijuana, plums,
and the narrator’s tongue that’s emblematic of his whole persona. The dis-
carded coffeepot and tire are trash, though they add to the richness and
complexity of the scene. The blackberries and plums are organic treasures
to be foraged and devoured. The marijuana – “my marijuana” the poet calls
it, expressing pride in ownership – is nearly lost in the clutter (CP 135). Part
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list, part catalogue, the poem offers a portrait of a strange and wonderful
backyard in Berkeley, California, and a portrait of a man, too.
Ginsberg doesn’t once use the first person pronoun “I,” but he offers an
intimate portrait of a himself in the open air, working with his hands, fixing
the toilet, cleaning, and gardening. He’s Adam in a feral Berkeley garden
giving “godly extra drops” of water to the vegetables and picking and eating
plums from a small tree he calls an “angel” (CP 135). In the very last line,
the poet suggests his own inner, emotional landscape when he describes his
“dry and lovelorn tongue” (CP 135). Sadly, there’s no one else to share par-
adise with him. Still, without drugs, chanting, or meditation, the narrator
reaches a state of beatitude – a key spiritual component of the beat aesthetic.
Ironically, the poem never describes the interior of the cottage, only the gar-
den beyond; the secrets are all on the outside not the inside, as one might
expect. Ginsberg doesn’t prescribe happiness, but he offers “a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events” that communicate emotions to readers and
allow them to discover their own happiness – or not.
In 1957, Ginsberg delighted in the sensational news about the San
Francisco trial of “Howl.” But he was distressed by literary critics such as
Norman Podhoretz, a classmate at Columbia, who blamed him and Kerouac
for juvenile delinquency and also irked by James Dickey, the poet, who dis-
missed “Howl” as the work of “an American adolescent.”8 Kerouac went on
television to defend himself – and sounded goofy. Ginsberg took his cause
to Columbia and read his poetry there and to audiences from Seattle to
Los Angeles. Then, he did what young American writers in search of fame
had been doing for at least a century and a half: he went to Europe; met
European writers, including the French surrealist novelist Louis-Ferdinand
Celine; and wrote ecstatically about European artists in angry and yet tender
poems such as “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear” and “At Apollinaire’s Grave.”
In Europe, he went on writing about death and dying; later, he would do
much the same in Asia and in the United States, too. In the late 1950s and
early 1960s, he wrote everywhere he went with renewed self-confidence.
A peripatetic poet on the road far more than Kerouac, he created memora-
ble verse in Chile, France, Morocco, Cambodia, Japan, India, and Eastern
Europe. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Snyder or with his lover, Peter
Orlovsky, he met local poets and, as a pilgrim, quested for a spiritual desti-
nation. “Angkor Wat” – a long, self-mocking, self-aggrandizing poem set in
Cambodia, recounts his own inner and outer journeys.
He could easily have gone on writing about his Beat buddies, and indeed
he continued to turn them into larger-than-life legends in poems such as
“Many Loves,” “The Names,” and “Footnote to ‘Howl’ ” that begins with
the word “Holy!” repeated fifteen times and that pays homage to Kerouac,
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Burroughs, and Cassady, the three men who are named in the dedication at
the beginning of “Howl.” Ginsberg never stopped writing about his friends,
but life interceded and altered the direction and the subject matter of his
writing. His mother, Naomi, died at the age of 62, and that event profoundly
shifted his emotional makeup and expanded the arena for his poetry. “My
heart is empty,” he wrote in his journal. “I must continue writing. My youth
is ending” (quote in AS 178).
Ginsberg’s essay “How Kaddish Happened” – an account of the birth
and development of “Kaddish” – is not entirely accurate. Oddly or perhaps
predictably, he was impelled to mythologize the origin and the evolution
of his work, as though to be a post-modern poet meant creating narratives
about the making of art as well as making art itself. The first writing of the
poem did not take place in Paris in 1958, as he asserted, but two years ear-
lier in 1956 when he was at sea as a sailor aboard the U.S.N.S. Sgt. Jack
F. Pendleton. The original title of the poem was “Kaddish or the Sea Power,”
a fact that he did not remember or conveniently ignored when he described
how it came into existence. Other details he remembered accurately.
In Berkeley in 1956, he had in fact received a telegram from his brother,
Eugene, informing him that Naomi had died in a mental hospital. “Telegram
from Gene, Naomi dead,” he would write tersely in “Kaddish” (CP 224). No
prayer had been said for his mother, and he realized he would have to write
an elegy that would honor her troubled life and give meaning to her sudden
death. In his initial journal entries about Naomi and in his first attempts to
write about her, he barely scratched his own emotional surface, though he
knew that he wanted the poem to probe deeply and express sadness and
“universal joy at creation” (quoted in AS 178). Little by little, he explored the
complex knot that tied him to his mother and experimented with the shape
of the poem. Like “Howl,” his new work would have an “I”: a persona who
would narrate the story and yet not be in the foreground. If “Howl” took
readers on a “teahead joy ride” with “angleheaded hipsters,” “Kaddish” led
them across the epic life of an immigrant and then on a funeral procession
that ended “over grave stones in Long Island” (CP 227). Sadder, and far less
rambunctious than “Howl,” “Kaddish” reflects Ginsberg’s emotional and
artistic maturity. Many critics view it as his masterpiece.
As he wrote, he remembered traumatic experiences that were buried in his
subconscious. While he knew that he loved his mother, he also discovered
his rage at her. “I . . . hate my mother,” he told Kerouac (quoted in AS 116).
He also confessed to Kerouac, “How I hate women” (quoted in AS 148).
His misogyny is apparent in “Howl,” in which many of the women char-
acters are “shrews” (HOP 14). “Kaddish” enabled him to heal emotional
wounds and expunge his sense of anger, resentment, and guilt. Then, too,
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it transcends misogyny. Ginsberg moved through grief to honor his mother

as a “Communist beauty” and a “beautiful Garbo of my Karma” (CP 223).
Perhaps no twentieth-century American poem by a son about a mother is as
profoundly moving.
Ginsberg arranged “Kaddish” in five parts: “proem,” “narrative,
“hymn,” “lament, and “litany & fugue.” The poem begins in the present in
New York, with the word “strange” that reverberates from beginning to
end as in the lines, “Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets &
eyes, while I walk on/ the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village” (CP
209). In a series of “flashbacks” the poet recounts Naomi’s life and times,
from 1905, when she arrived in the United States from Russia, through
marriage and motherhood, and then traces her gradual descent into
madness, hospitalization, and death. (For years, Ginsberg tried to make
“Kaddish” into a movie by carving out cinematic scenes and by crafting
dialogue, but the project never went into production.) In “lament,” he
provides “a surrealist summary” and bids “farewell” to his mother. In the
last section, he visits her grave, hears the “strange cry” of crows, and bal-
ances their death-like “caw caw caw” sound with the word “Lord” that
he hears as “an echo in the sky.” The poem ends on a note of universal
grief and acceptance of death: “Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord
Lord caw caw caw / Lord” (CP 227).
In “Howl,” much of the religious imagery derives from the New
Testament, though the poem also includes “Mohammedan angels” and
“endless Jehovahs” (HOP 9, 21). In the mid-1950s, Ginsberg was fixated
on the image of Christ on the cross, and Part I of “Howl” ends with Christ’s
last words: “Eli Eli lama sabachthani?”9 In “Kaddish,” he looked toward
Judaism and remembered the teachings of Abraham and the Old Testament
prophets. Indeed, he was never more Jewish than when he wrote “Kaddish.”
Afterward, he turned first to Hinduism and then to Buddhism, though near
the end of his life he returned to his own Jewish roots in poems such as
“Yiddishe Kopf.” In photos of him taken in middle age he already looks like
an old Jew.
In the 1960s, he joined political causes and amplified his own voice of pro-
test. In Asia, he witnessed firsthand the influence of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), the U.S. State Department, and the Pentagon. In Eastern
Europe, he saw the pernicious role of Communists and Communism. All
through the Cold War, he denounced both Moscow and Washington in
poems such as “Capitol Air.” In Chicago and New York, he lent his name
to the burgeoning movement against the War in Vietnam, and in “Wichita
Vortex Sutra” (1966) – published first in underground U.S. newspapers and
then in a City Lights volume entitled The Fall of America and Other Poems
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(1973) – he wrote a powerful work that he read aloud at rallies and that
fueled opposition to U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.
No longer cautious about expressing his deep-seated, long-simmering
anger about American militarism, he poured out his passions in “Wichita
Vortex Sutra.” He had long admired the revolutionary ardor of the
nineteenth-century English romantic poets, such as William Blake, and he
now adopted wholeheartedly Shelley’s celebrated definition of poets as the
“unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” he
also describes the beauty of the American heartland, including Wichita,
Kansas, and honors American writers from Melville and Whitman to Ezra
Pound. What bothered him intensely during the Vietnam War was what he
felt was the perversion of the American language by politicians and gen-
erals: “language abused / for Advertisement, / language used / like magic
for power on the planet” (CP 401). To counterbalance the power of the
Pentagon and the White House, he chanted his own verbal magic. “I here
declared the end of the War!,” he exclaimed, believing in the power of lan-
guage to bring about peace (CP 407).
In “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” the political is matched by the autobiograph-
ical. Ginsberg couldn’t escape writing about himself, especially about his
abiding sense of loneliness. In much of the poetry that he wrote in the 1960s,
he continued to reveal himself, even as he dissected the society around him.
For years, he had predicted “the fall of America” – a fate he viewed as inev-
itable and that he wanted to accelerate. What he hoped for was a nation
without borders or bravado: a big hippie commune built on peace and love.
The euphoria of the era swept him up, as did many of its clichés and its
uncritical assumptions about sex, drugs, and spiritual awakening. The rev-
olution would materialize, Ginsberg insisted, if only Americans would take
LSD, become Buddhists and meditate. His poetry became more formulaic;
he repeated himself in work that he wrote without thinking deeply and with-
out revision, and that suffered accordingly. Indeed, he came to believe the
Buddhist mantra, “First Thought Best Thought,” though his best thoughts
usually took time to unravel and mature, just as his most moving poems
rarely went unrevised. “Kaddish” took three years to write.
Even with the nine-line 1992 poem “Autumn Leaves,” he revised again
and again to find the right words to express his feelings about aging. A com-
panion piece to “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley” – written when he
was twenty-nine – “Autumn Leaves” was written when he was sixty-six and
“happy not yet / to be a corpse” (SP 390). Once again, the poet describes “a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events.” In “A Strange New Cottage in
Berkeley,” he’s alone in his backyard. In “Autumn Leaves,” he has a young
companion to keep him company in his New York apartment, though he
376
Allen Ginsberg
calls himself a “solitary” man. In “Autumn Leaves,” he’s inside, not outside,
and the domestic objects that he describes include dental floss, toothpicks,
shirts, socks, and pants. The poem describes the poet’s morning rituals: writ-
ing in a notebook, making breakfast, brushing his hair, and pausing for a
moment at the sink to reflect on the fact that he’s finally “learning how to
take care of my body” (SP 390). To the end of his days, he wrote about his
body. In “Autumn Leaves,” while he knows he’s aging, he’s also aware that
he’s young enough at heart to learn new things about himself and to appre-
ciate the mundane world of quotidian reality.
Famous the world over, continually traveling, reading and lecturing, he
became a captive of the personae he created. In “I’m a Prisoner of Allen
Ginsberg” he looks at himself with detachment and asks, “Who is this Slave
Master makes / me answer letters in his name / Write poetry year after year,
keep up / appearances” (WS 40). He did not include “I’m a Prisoner” in
Selected Poems, 1947–1995 (1996), the last major anthology of his work,
perhaps because it made him feel too naked and too vulnerable. The price
of the fame that he coveted had been the loss of privacy and anonymity
that helped him write, and, though he boasted increasingly at the end of his
life about his own candor, he could not help but conceal himself even as he
revealed himself.
From nearly fifty years, from 1947 to 1995, Ginsberg wrote poems that
were never published, or else that were published and little noticed, such
as his untitled elegy for his friend and lover Natalie Jackson, which he
wrote after her death in San Francisco in 1955. Those uncollected, largely
unknown poems would probably startle readers, critics, and teachers who
have come to assume that they know nearly everything there is to know
about the legendary Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, who wrote “Howl” in one
sitting – or so they thought – told America to go fuck itself, and seemed to
be eternally transparent about himself and ebullient about the causes he
adopted. Sadly, as he recognized, he was too easily understood and often
greatly misunderstood. Unfortunately, many of his fans were not alert to his
complexities, insecurities, and ambivalences.
“Quarrel with yourself,” Ginsberg insisted, invoking W. B. Yeats. “Your
quarrels with yourself often make the best poems. Tell yourself your own
secrets and reveal yourself” (quoted in AS xvi). His own deep-seated quar-
rels with himself, along with his unwillingness to hue to certainties, gave
birth to his richest and most rewarding poems. Perhaps here, at the start of
the twenty-first-century, the global family of poets, visionaries, and seekers
after truth that he helped to create might remember him for his self-doubts
as well as for his self-promotions and look for the hidden meanings that lurk
between the lines.
377
Jonah Raskin
NOT E S
1 Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Edward Hirsch
(New York: Modern Library Classics, 2001): xxv.
2 Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as CP.
3 On the Road: The Original Scroll, eds. Penny Vlagopoulos, George Mouratandis,
and Joshua Kupetz (New York: Viking, 2007).
4 Many of the revisions along with the final text are reproduced in
“Howl”: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and Variant Versions, ed. Barry
Miles (New York: Harper, 2006).
5 “Howl” and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1956): 7–8. Hereafter
cited parenthetically by page number as HOP.
6 T. S. Eliot, review of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth
Century: Donne to Butler, ed. and with an introduction by Herbert J. C. Grierson
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). The review first appeared in the Times Literary
Supplement in October 1921.
7 Eliot, The Sacred Wood (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1921): 92.
8 Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the
Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 225. Hereafter
cited parenthetically by page number as AS.
9 “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” See Matthew 27:46.
F U RT H E R R E A DI NG
Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs, 1949–1993, boxed set of four CDs
(New York: Word Beat, 1994).
“Howl”: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and Variant Versions, ed. Barry
Miles (New York: Harper, 2006).
Journals: Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958 (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
Selected Poems, 1947–1995 (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).
Snapshot Poetics: A Photographic Memoir, ed. Michael Kohler (San Francisco:
Chronicle, 1993).
White Shroud: Poems, 1980–1985 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
Hyde, Lewis, ed., On The Poetry of Allen Ginsberg (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1984).
Kramer, Jane, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York: Random House, 1969).
Miles, Barry, Ginsberg: A Biography (London: Virgin, 2001).
Morgan, Bill, and David Stanford, eds., Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The
Letters (New York: Viking, 2010).
Raskin, Jonah, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the
Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Schumacher, Michael, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
ed., Family Business: Allen and Louis Ginsberg, Selected Letters Between a Father
and Son (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001).
378

Allen Ginsberg Irreverent Reverential and Apocalyptic American Poet

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Allen Ginsberg Irreverent Reverential and Apocalyptic American Poet

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27

Allen Ginsberg: Irreverent, Reverential,

In Allen Ginsberg’s exuberant, electrifying brand of iconoclastic poetry,

Renaissance,” as did Jack Kerouac, a mentor and surrogate older brother,

poetic version of what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower would call, as

it transcends misogyny. Ginsberg moved through grief to honor his mother

Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

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