Post-war Poetry: Ginsberg, Lowell and Plath

I.Circumstances ( kind of introduction)

-when ww2 started in Europe in 1939, most American wanted to stay out of it. „America first” was a
popular phrase at the time. People felt that America should worry about its own problems and forget
the rest of the world. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ( on dec.7, 1941) changed all that. By 1945,
America was a world power with huge international responsibilities. This made Americans both proud
and extremely uncomfortable.
- after the war, America entered an „Age of Anxiety”. The politics of America were influenced by 2
great fears: fear of the Bomb ( there would be a war with the Soviet Union using atomic bombs), fear
of communism.
-American authors show that they are very uncomfortable in the post war world. The new political
fears are less important to them than their own psychological problems in the new American society. It
is not a period of important experiments in style. Rather, the most interesting authors are developing
new and important themes.
-many writers of this period try to find new answers to the old question „Who am I?” many black
American and Jewish American writers find the answer by looking at their own cultural and racial
backgrounds. Others explore the ideas of modern philosophy and psychology
-The Beats:

 Group of American writers of the 1950s 

 they called themselves „beats” because they felt beaten by society and because they loved the
strong, free beat of jazz rhythms.
 Profound dissatisfaction with contemporary society 
 Dissociating themselves from mainstream America/middle class values ("squareness")
 Termed their weariness with American materialism after World War II
 Located in San Francisco and New York City's Greenwich Village
 Core-members: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs 
 The term "Beat generation" was coined by Jack Kerouac (in New York Times Magazine)
 1955: The Six Gallery reading of Howl 
 1956: Publication of Howl and its obscenity trial 
 1957: Keroauc's On the Road is published 
 1959: Burrough's  Naked Lunch is published in France (1962: in the US.) 
A)Robert Lowell:
-Born: Boston, Massachusetts (elite family, mercantile Protestantism, later disenchantment with it)
Education: Harvard and Kenyon College
Imprisoned in WWII ( as conscientious objector, a conchie)
1940: Refashioned himself, converted into Catholicism (it provided him with ritual symbols, lasted
only for 10 years) 
Teaching: Iowa, Boston, Harvard Universities 
1946: Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary's Castle 
1954: Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters 
1963: American Academy of Arts and Letters
1959: National Book Award for Life Studies 
1962: Bollingen Prize for Imitations (translations of Rilke, Baudelaire, Pasternak, Rimbaud, etc..)
10 volumes of verse  
- he was a poet whose style and beliefs changed several times in his career. In his early books of
poetry ( Lord Weary’s castle például) he is deeply Roman Catholic- later, at the end of the
50s, he lost his reliogios beliefs, he had some mental problems spent time in a mental
hospital ( in the poems, he not just only talks about his „ill-spirit”, but the ill-spirit of the
entire world). His last volumes were elegiac.
-his poetry can be defined as „confessional poetry”: Aim: to reveal the innermost experience for the
sake of art &survivalTurning his personal experience into an expression of general- public-historic
concern
a) Stylistic pecularities:

 His penchant for the triple adjective

 Attention-seeking oxymoron
 Free form
 He relates private and public breakdown in a muted poetry of understatement
 An apparently cavalier freedom with his public work (changed editions)
 Dissatisfaction with art itself , restlessness, unease
1.For the Union Dead:
-The title of the poem refers to Allen Tate’s 1928 poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead”. It is a
confessional poem, originally titled “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th” to commemorate
Robert Gould Shaw. The poem’s epigraph, the Latin inscription, “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem
Publicam,” which means “He leaves all else to serve the republic” in English, introduces the theme of
noble self-sacrifice.
-For the Union Dead’, narrated by a first-person speaker, starts with Lowell’s reminiscence of his
childhood memory of the Boston Aquarium. It commemorates the sacrifice of Colonel Robert Shaw, a
Union officer killed while leading a regiment of black troops during the Civil War. Lowell connects
his childhood and a Civil War memorial to contemporary life, including progress and civil rights. He
laments the erosion of heroic idealism and increasing self-interest and greed in contemporary
American society, contrasting the historic past and present. He deliberates on missing idealism as
being dead among the people of America of 1963 and in the modern culture in general.
B) Allen Ginsberg:

 Born: 1926, New Jersey

 Parents: Father: schoolteacher, poet, Mother: a Russian émigrée (cf: Kaddish)
 Education: Columbia University (expelled in his sophomore year, obscene
drawings/phrases  on his dormitory window)
 More influential on him: William Burroughs ( an inventive experiment in American prose,
drug-addict, expatriate life, all about these experinece in  JUNKIE)
 Lived periodically with Burroughs and Kerouac 
 Odd jobs: messman on merchnat tankers, a welder, a night-porter, dishwasher
 Ginsberg’s poetry was a focus ont he spiritual and visionary. His interest in these matters was
inspired by a series of visions he had while reading Blake’s poetry („ the calling moment”).
2.Supermarket in California ( ide is berakom a kis esszém+ egy elemzést!):
-The poem's speaker—generally read as Ginsberg himself—enters the garish, brightly-lit supermarket
and has a vision of Walt Whitman, a 19th-century American poet, whose work he has been reading.
Whitman, for his part, acts almost like an alien placed on Earth from outer space; the supermarket
environment doesn't make sense to his 19th-century perspective. The speaker imagines playfully
tasting the produce and not paying for any of it, before asking more searching and philosophical
questions of his poet guide. He wonders whether America has grown too preoccupied with
consumerism and a money-orientated way, and in doing so if the country has lost its way and its
capacity to love. The poem ends with an image of Whitman in the underworld, suggesting that
Whitman's idealistic and romantic vision of America is probably already dead.
Themes:

a) consumerism: The poem rejects American consumerism—a way of life that places great
importance on buying and owning things, on being a customer  with money to spend and
endless options to choose from. Feeling that he doesn’t fit in with a world of shiny shopping
aisles and identical houses and cars, the speaker (generally treated as Ginsberg himself) finds
kinship in the figure of Walt Whitman—one of the founding figures in American poetry.
Through his vision of Whitman, the speaker senses an alternative America. And though the
poem never defines this alternative vision for the country outright, it mourns the “lost
America of love”—what the nation once was, or could have become.

The poem takes place in the heart of consumerist culture—in the belly of the beast. California is
closely associated with an idea of the American Dream that equates money and happiness: the home of
Hollywood and the rich and famous, a place where lives are ostensibly filled with sunshine and joy.
The supermarket brimming with food reflects this sense of carefree abundance.
And yet, the poem also implies that none of this is real, that the supposed freedom offered by this way
of life is as fake as the movies pumped out by Hollywood. The fruit is "neon," so bright as to seem
garish, and the speaker shops for "images" rather than actual nourishment to satiate his "hungry
fatigue."
Nevertheless, the poem establishes the extent to which this way of life has a hold on people. “Whole
families” parade down the supermarket aisles as if in some kind of trance —“wives” are “in” the
“avocados,” and there are “babies in the tomatoes.” In other words, they are totally immersed in the
consumerist way of life that the supermarket represents.
This way of life robs them of their individual humanity, the poem implies, reducing people to the
things they buy and instilling a sense of conformity but making people think they all want the same
things. This idea is later echoed by the image of "blue automobiles in driveways," which implies a
cookie-cutter vision of success. People think they'll be happy if only they can buy this car or have that
house, but the speaker doesn't buy in, and that’s why he conjures up a vision of Walt Whitman.
For poets of Ginsberg’s generation, Whitman stood for a kind of celebration of the common man, the
nobility of labor, and people’s individuality. Whitman’s poetry reflects an idealistic romanticism,
which he viewed as inseparable from America itself. Whitman becomes something like the speaker’s
guide, which the speaker at one point explicitly asking Whitman which "way" to go.
Placing Whitman in this capitalist and commercial wonderland—the supermarket—deliberately
clashes these two different Americas together in order to highlight the country's failure to live up to
Whitman's ideal. Indeed, the speaker imagines this man from another era trying to make sense of the
abundant variety of products, interrogating them and his strange, overwhelming environment. In
initially presenting Whitman as lost and confused himself, the poem suggests how far removed
modern society has become from the way of life that Whitman imagined.
The speaker then imagines himself and Whitman strolling through the aisles, tasting "fancy" food at
their whim without paying for any of it. The speaker and Whitman—in the speaker’s minds—thus
share in common a rejection of the importance of money, rebelling against what society tells them to
do.
In the end, though, the poem suggests that the optimism expressed in Whitman’s poetry has failed to
become reality and probably never will—indeed, it probably never existed in the first place. Now, time
is running out—the "doors close in an hour"—suggesting that it's too late to change what America has
become. That’s why both Whitman and the speaker ultimately cut such "lonely" figures. The poem
then concludes by intensifying its sense of futility and isolation: Whitman is pictured alone on the
shores of the underworld, the speaker walking home from the supermarket—and neither of them in the
America they desire.

C)Sylvia Plath:

 Born: Boston, Massachusetts

 Father:  a Prussian, entomologist, biology teacher, treatise on bumblebees author
 Mother:  Austrian descent, early left alone pennylesss with two children 
 Raised as a Unitarian
 Smith College, summa cum laude, guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine 
 Electroconvulsive therapy/insulin shock for depression 
 Suicide attempts 
3.Daddy
-published posthumously in 1965 as part of the collection Ariel
-originally written in October 1962, a month after Plath’s separation from her husband, Ted Hughes,
and four months before her suicide.
-it is a deeply complex poem informed by the poet’s relationship with her deceased father, Otto Plath.
- Told from the perspective of a woman addressing her father, the memory of whom has an oppressive
power over her, the poem details the speaker's struggle to break free of his influence.
(Summary):
The speaker begins the poem by addressing the circumstances in which she lives, saying that they are
simply no longer adequate. She compares herself to a foot living inside a black shoe. For 30 years she
has lived this way, deprived and without color, not even having the courage to breathe or sneeze.
The speaker then addresses her father, informing him that she has had to kill him, though she then says
that he actually died before she had the chance to do so. She describes her father as being heavy as
marble and like "a bag full of God," as well as like a horrifying statue with one toe that looks like a
San Francisco seal—huge and gray.
Continuing the image of her father as a statue, the speaker describes his head being located in the
bizarre blue-green waters of the Atlantic Ocean, near the beautiful coastal town of Nauset,
Massachusetts. The speaker tells her father that she used to pray for his return from the dead, and then
in German says, "Oh, you."
The speaker prayed in the German language, in a town in Poland that was utterly destroyed by endless
wars, a town whose name is so common that the speaker's Polish "friend"—whom she refers to using a
derogatory slur—says there must be at least twelve of them.
Because of this, she couldn't tell where her father had been, nor where exactly he came from. She
couldn't talk to him. It felt as though her tongue kept getting caught in her jaw.
It was as though her tongue were stuck in a trap made of barbed wire. The speaker stutters the word
"I" in German, demonstrating what it felt like to not be able to speak. She thought every German was
her father. She thought the language was offensive and disgusting.
The speaker continues describing the German language, saying that it was like the engine of a train,
carrying her off like a Jew to a concentration camp. She began speaking like a Jew, and then started
thinking that she might in fact be a Jew.
The speaker, perhaps still imagining herself on this train, then describes the Austrian state of Tyrol and
the beer of Austria's capital city as being impure and false. She then lists the other things that might
make her Jewish: her Romani ancestry, her strange luck, and her tarot cards.
She has always been afraid of her father in particular, whom she associates with the German air force
and who spoke words that seemed impressive at first but turned out to be nonsense. She goes on to
describe his carefully groomed mustache and his blue, Aryan eyes, and then refers again to his link to
the German military, this time invoking the armored vehicles used in WWII. The speaker addresses
her father as "Oh, You" again, but this time in English.
Again describing her father, the speaker claims that he is not God after all, but rather a swastika—the
symbol of the German Nazi regime, so opaque that no light could get through it. She then goes on to
say that all women love Fascists, being stepped on brutally by someone who is a monster at heart.
The speaker then recalls a photograph of her father where he is standing in front of a blackboard. In
the picture one could see that he has a cleft chin, but the speaker implies that he has the cleft feet of a
devil as well. The speaker decides that her father is in fact a devil, as was the wicked man who tore her
passionate heart into pieces.
The speaker was 10 years old when her father died. When she was 20, she tried to commit suicide so
that she could finally be reunited with him. She thought even being buried with him would be enough.
The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, however, as she was discovered and forced into recovery. The
plan having failed, she came up with another. She made a model of her father, a man in black who,
like her father, looked the part of a Nazi.
This man had a love of torture. She married him. The speaker, directly addressing her father again,
claims she's finally through. The telephone's unplugged and no one will be getting through to her.
The speaker reckons that if she's killed one man, she's in effect killed two. She refers to her husband as
a vampire, saying that he drank her blood for a year, no, seven years. She then tells her father he can
lie back now.
There's a sharp wooden post, the kind used to kill vampires, stuck through her father's heart. The
speaker imagines a village in which the locals never liked her father, and so they are dancing and
stomping on his body because they always knew exactly what he was. The speaker deems her father
despicable and again tells him that she's finished.
Themes:
1.Gender and opression: The poem's speaker has been enthralled by her father since childhood yet
comes to realize that his legacy is one of violence and oppression. She spends the poem breaking free
from his hold over her, but the poem is not solely about this one, specific relationship. Instead, the
speaker’s relationship to her father’s memory can be thought of as representative of the broader power
imbalance between men and women in a patriarchal society, or a society in which men hold most
positions of political, social, and moral authority. The poem implies that such a world subjects women
to repressive rules and violence at the hands of men, limiting their autonomy, self-expression, and
freedom.
The first indication that the poem is addressing patriarchy is through its title. By addressing “Daddy”
(rather than “father” or “dad”), Plath immediately sets up a dynamic in which a male figure is
venerated, literally located at the top of the poem, while the female speaker is infantilized; she is an
adult addressing her father with a child’s vocabulary, trying to communicate with him through the
sing-song cadence of a nursery rhyme.
The speaker then describes the oppressive shadow of her father's memory by comparing herself to a
foot that has lived inside a “black shoe ... for thirty years,” too scared to even breathe. In other words,
she has been completely smothered by the presence of her father, who is further described as a
colossal statue, heavy as "marble" or "a bag full of God." All of these descriptors emphasize the sheer
weight and breadth of the speaker's father even in memory, which seems to press down upon the
speaker years after his death. This speaks to his personal hold on her, but also to the figurative force of
the oppression faced by women in a male-dominated world.
Because of this oppression, the speaker has felt unable to communicate with, let alone stand up to, her
father throughout her life. Not only has she "Barely dar[ed] to breathe" for thirty years, but her
"tongue" has been "stuck in [her] jaw ... in a barb wire snare." This image emphasizes the sheer
violence of her father's hold over her, which denies her any ability to express herself. The poem thus
presents the inability to communicate as one clear byproduct of oppression.
Throughout the poem the speaker also explicitly conflates her father with the Nazis, and begins to
identify herself with the Jewish people—a response which reveals her feelings of utter powerlessness
against her father. The Nazis were Fascists—authoritarians who violently squashed any dissent—and
this controversial comparison is meant to again highlight the brutality of her father's presence,
something the speaker implies she was actually to cow to.
Indeed, the speaker even makes the extreme, seemingly offhand comment that “Every woman adores a
Fascist.” This not only draws attention to the power imbalance between men and women, but to the
normalization of violence against women—violence that is so woven into every aspect of society that
women can only be seen to “adore” their oppressors. In other words, this oppression is so
commonplace, so accepted, that it is hard for victims to even recognize it, let alone fight back.
To that end, the speaker makes “a model” of her father and marries him. The husband is described as
having “a Meinkampf look” and “a love of the rack and the screw,” two images which attest to his
violent and oppressive nature. This husband also becomes a "vampire," draining the speaker of blood
for seven years—a metaphor for the way marriage, under patriarchy, robs a woman of any life of her
own. Moving from her father to another man has done nothing to free the speaker, because she is still
living within an oppressive world that treats her as subservient to the men in her life.
Only in recognizing the patriarchal violence and oppression present in her marriage and asserting that
she’s “finally through” can the speaker metaphorically drive a stake through her father’s heart. In other
words, she is not only freeing herself of her oppressive marriage, but of the kind of gendered dynamic
modeled to her by her father. In this way the poem argues that the only way to fight patriarchal
oppression is to recognize and expose its many, shapeshifting forms.
4.Lady Lazarus:
-written in 1962, before her suicide
-The poem alludes to the biblical story of Lazarus, whom Jesus famously resurrected; this poem’s
female speaker also dies and is resurrected—multiple times, in fact, and not always happily. Each
revival is akin to a circus performance for a voyeuristic, "peanut-crunching crowd" that's hoping for a
glimpse of the speaker’s "scars." The speaker ultimately warns that she will one day rise from the
ashes of her death and devour "men like air." The dark poem provides insight into a suicidal mind, a
glimpse at the horror of being a woman in a patriarchal world, and a critique of society's twisted
fascination with suffering.
Themes:
1.Death and Suicide:
Throughout "Lady Lazarus," the speaker uses extended metaphors of death and resurrection to express
her own personal suffering. The speaker compares herself to Lazarus (a biblical reference to a man
Jesus raised from the dead), telling the reader that she has died multiple times, and is, in fact, dead
when the poem begins. However, through external forces, the speaker is brought back to life time and
time again. For Lazarus, his resurrection was a joyous event, and one might assume that all such
resurrections would be happy. But the speaker of the poem subverts that expectation: she wants to die.
And so the efforts of those who want to save her—whether loved ones, or doctors, or whoever else—
feel to the speaker like selfish, controlling acts committed against her wishes.
Obviously, the speaker is not actually dead, but uses this metaphor to demonstrate how unbearable life
is and, in turn, explain (and perhaps justify) her suicide attempts. Thus, the reader can interpret the
poem as the musings of a suicidal mind, with death being alternately presented as freedom, escape
from suffering, and the achievement of a sort of peace.
Throughout the poem, the speaker often contrasts life and death by using imagery that subverts the
reader's expectations. Note how the speaker describes life through disturbing images, such as
comparing her skin to a "Nazi lampshade," or describing her resurrection as "...flesh / the grave cave
ate will be / at home on me." This imagery is surprisingly applied to the speaker's living body after it is
resurrected. The speaker describes her experience of living as a kind of torture, almost as a kind of
death—when she is brought back to life, her skin is like the dead skin of someone killed in the
Holocaust, it is the skin of a dead woman forced back onto her living self. Thus, the speaker
demonstrates how living, for her, is what death feels like for most people.
In contrast, the speaker describes death as a kind of calmness. For instance, when the speaker
describes her second suicide attempt , the imagery evokes the peacefulness of the sea: the speaker tells
the reader she "rocked shut," alluding to the rhythmic, calming waves of the ocean, while the "worms"
or maggots that invade a decaying corpse are depicted as "pearls." The speaker also transforms into a
"seashell," shedding her skin to become a creature with a hard, outer shell, implying that for her death
offers blissful solitude and protection.
For the speaker, skin, which falls away in death, is a symbol that the speaker is still alive. When she is
resurrected against her will, the “flesh the grave cave ate” reappears on her. The speaker's disdain for
her skin seems to stem in part from the fact that the skin both displays and is the receptacle of the pain
and suffering of life. The speaker at one point mentions others "eyeing .. my scars," capturing both
how skin is scarred by trauma, but also how skin displays that trauma for the world to see. In this way,
the speaker's skin subjects her to what she believes is an intolerable invasion of privacy. Death offers
protection from that invasion.
When the speaker begins the poem, she reveals that she is currently dead—it can be assumed that she
has tried to kill herself. She tells the reader she will be reborn as the woman she was. However, by the
end of the poem, the speaker has transformed into a phoenix: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair /
And I eat men like air.” Although this is seemingly a moment of empowerment for the speaker, this
turn also conveys the hopelessness the speaker feels about her situation. The phoenix, a mythological
creature, is known for its regenerative abilities. Thus, like the speaker, the phoenix dies and is reborn.
However, because the speaker has transformed into a phoenix at the end of the poem, this could
signify that the speaker is stuck in a cycle of dying and being reborn that she can neither escape nor
control. In this way, the speaker expresses the intolerability of her life—though, logically, the reader
understands that the speaker is not truly immortal, the speaker demonstrates that her life is so
insufferable that it feels as though her life will continue indefinitely, through the exhausting patterns of
suicide and being saved and brought back to a life she does not want. This pattern, in turn, also
explains why death is so desirable for the speaker: because she feels as though she cannot die, and
must suffer forever, death is only solution to end her suffering.
2.Gender and Oppression:
-Lady Lazarus" is told from the perspective of a woman in a male-dominated society, and the speaker
repeatedly blames her suffering on the men whom she sees as oppressing her. The poem suggests that
the men mentioned are the ones—whether loved ones or doctors—who keep bringing the speaker back
to life, suggesting how little autonomy women can ever hope to have in a patriarchal world. The
poem's metaphors of death and resurrection, then, come to illustrate how society seeks to dominate
women’s lives and bodies. The implication is that one of the reasons that the speaker wants to die is
because, ironically, it’s the only way to exercise some semblance of control over her own life—which
then makes the fact that she can’t die all the more agonizing.