Ginsberg attempted to denounce in his poetry the acts of humanity that sought to circumvent and tame nature. The atom bomb is one example Ginsberg uses in several of his poems, including "Howl" and " America. Ginsberg's poetry often attempts to compare the natural world with the monolithic military industrial complex that characterized the social and political life of Americans after the second World War.
In "A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley," for example, Ginsberg uses imagery of modern conveniences like toilets or coffee pots as a contrast to the wild everyday beauty of the plants he finds in his backyard. In Part II of "Howl," Ginsberg denounces the industrialized world that destroys nature and ultimately destroys the soul of humankind.
Moloch represents the modern institutions of finance, war, industry, and government that have conspired to destroy all good for the sake of profit. Ginsberg's Moloch, like the ancient middle eastern god, is a creature of sacrifice. Moloch asks all individuals to sacrifice their souls, their freedom, and even their lives for a false patriotism and devotion. Moloch appears in Part II of "Howl. Moloch is "unobtainable dollars" and a "judger of men!
What makes Moloch so powerful is not just its evil, but also the way in which profit and war and pollution are lifted up as ideals of advancement and cultural power. In Moloch, Ginsberg sees a generation sacrificing its soul to a set of false values. Though Ginsberg did not remain a particularly devout Jew, the tenets and traditions of Judaism -- and of other world religions -- did serve as major themes in much of his work.
The prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible is an especially important theme. In the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible, a prophet is called by God to announce to the people of Israel that they have been wicked and that they must repent in order to call on God's favor and save their people. In some of the prophetic stories, the people do turn back to God and are saved. In some of the other stories, they do not and destruction and captivity are the result.
In "America," Ginsberg used that same prophetic tradition to proclaim an end to divine favor for his country. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this Here is an opinion piece written by a woman whose After complaints from several students, the school administration suspended Olio, then forced him to resign.
Please Master Queer Culture Collection best sites. Posted on April 2, by Samm Worthing. Allen Ginsberg is remembered as perhaps the most influential queer poets of his time. Writing during the post World War II era and having led a full life which included drugs and a brief period of time in a mental institution, Ginsberg has all Allen Ginsberg "Please Master" poetry archive For more information Should a high school teacher have been forced to resign A Connecticut high school teacher shared the highly sexual Allen Ginsberg poem, "Please Master," with a high school class.
What a stupid, creepy thing to do. Sparknotes bookrags the meaning summary overview critique of explanation pinkmonkey. Quick fast explanatory summary. The poem is, without a doubt, quite sexually explicit, but come now, let's consider The poem is, without a doubt, quite sexually explicit, but come now, let's consider all Poet Allen Ginsberg was as loquacious on the subject of poetry as he was in the poetry itself, spouting streams of stream of consciousness words about poetry almost as often as capturing poetry on paper.
Born in in Newark, New Jersey, Ginsberg was the son of a school-teacher father and a Communist Party member mother. Related News Real EstateYour browser indicates if you've visited this link But advertising revenue helps support our journalism.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, bedrock of the Beat Generation, dead at Your browser indicates if you've visited this link Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Lazer Lederhendler believes every translator needs an imaginative mindYour browser indicates if you've visited this link Lederhendler went on to work for government agencies before completing a Master's degree in English These 30 celebrities went to Ivy League colleges, but not all of them graduatedYour browser indicates if you've visited this link the Kenyan-Mexican Oscar-winning actress attended Yale for her master of fine arts degree in acting, graduating in Related Videos.
Allen Ginsberg - Please Master Please Master Jammer Reads: America by Allen Ginsberg Video result. It was only late that critics were aware of this fact.
His work seems now for us in the s, a central expression of that tradition. It tries to show the scope, causes and nature of his rebellion and to place him in the long tradition of rebellion in American literature.
The following is a set of questions for which the thesis tries to find answers: What factors influenced Ginsberg in his rebellion? What social, political and literary aspects did he attack? Is there a single rationale for his attacks on all these aspects? Did he aim at mere social and political reform in the conventional sense? Was he a rebel or a revolutionist? Was he an anarchist? Why did he attack Modernism and New Criticism? How can we approach the formal aspects of his poetry? The first section is a short review of the tradition of rebellion in American literature, only to show how Ginsberg fits into this tradition.
It begins with the political and social unrest which America witnessed at that time, and then it turns to a discussion of the Beats for whom Ginsberg was the spokesman. The study, thus, will make clear the matrix of ideas common to all Beats. The last section of this chapter deals with the influences that certain individuals had on Ginsberg. It shows the nature of his rebellion by referring to others who influenced him. As the influence of William Blake is crucially important in this concern, it is discussed in some detail.
Discussing his attacks on society and politics, this chapter tries to find out his line of thought that may account for all these attacks. This chapter also tackles the charges made against the poetry of Ginsberg on the technical and formal levels. Those writers belonged to a bigger movement of rebellion known as the Beat Generation.
Ignoring the history of American cultural life, some critics and sociologists saw in the Beats a threat to American culture and civilized life.
The Beats also had behind them the force of a long, rich and deeply American tradition. They held with Martin Luther that no Pope or bishop had a right to impose any law upon a Christian soul without consent and that God chose freely those He would save and those He would damn eternally. In the field of literature, rebellion went almost side by side with creativity. Had it not been for the nineteenth century writers who rebelled against the domination of Continental and British literature, there might have been no American literature, and all the literature written in America might have been still treated as a branch of English literature.
What gave the American literature its distinctive character was writers like Edgar Allen Poe — , Nathaniel Hawthorne — and Herman Melville — who refused to be just second- hand Englishmen and tried to achieve originality. The reaction against the British and Continental literary domination was wide-spread in America during the first half of the 19 th century. This was helped by the war of which confirmed American independence. Theorists began to call for a great American literature that would match the emerging political greatness of the nation.
Critics soon formed some notion about what subjects American writers should deal with. Those subjects were the distant colonial past, Indian legends and subjects from the recent colonial past. In his The Poet Emerson gives examples of purely American themes: Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Dolphos and are as swiftly passing away.
Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and will not wait long for metres. Throughout the 18 th and the 19th centuries American writers maintained a rebellious view in all controversial political and social issues. There were many issues to inspire their rebellion: the oppression of the American Indians, black slavery and Mexican War. In his Benito Cereno Melville explored black slavery.
Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail in symbolic protest against being taxed to support the Mexican War. The American practice of waging wars was condemned by many generations of American writers. Also many Beat writers protested against the American involvement in Vietnam. In the 19th century American writers also attacked many social and institutional evils such as materialism and the suppression of the individual.
With industrialism people were being led to waste their money, and therefore, their lives on artificial wants.
This led to a loss of the archetypal Yankee virtue of individualism. They called for the freedom of the individual and felt the threat of social conformity to the individuality of man. Other 19 th century writers in America were aware of the attempt by institutions to over-control the individual and shape his spirit and morality.
In The Celestial Railroad Hawthorne satirically described the condition at the Vanity Fair of modern America, where there was a: … species of machine for the wholesale manufacture of individual morality …with which a man has merely to connect himself, throwing, as it were, his quota of virtue into the common stock; and the president and directors will take care that the aggregate amount will be supplied.
It tells the adventures of Huck who runs down the Mississippi after arranging the proof of his death. The wandering of Huck sets the tradition for the bohemian rebel who rejects the conventional restraints and is always moving in search of his individual spirit.
This hobo figure was to become the ideal hero for the Beat writers and the youth of the counterculture. Whitman is another great figure in the rich tradition of rebellion in American literature. In the preface to his Leaves of Grass Whitman describes the poet He is no arguer … he is judgement. He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing. So he announced his rejection of conventional form, and even conventional subject matter.
But nothing at all is said about rhythm. The implication is that, for Whitman, rhythm is not necessarily a beauty. It is true that Whitman wrote few poems using conventional verse.
Yet he did not consider conventional verse an appropriate medium for what he wanted to say. In his Leaves of Grass Whitman startled the literary world by using lines of variable length which depended for their rhythmic effect on cadenced units and on repetition, balance and variation of words, phrases, clauses and lines instead of the recurrent metric feet. Indifferent about the artifice, Whitman is completely absorbed by the message of his art; his call was for freedom not only from literary forms but freedom in the large sense.
Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast- bones, hell under the skull bones, Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers, Keeping fair with the custom, speaking not a syllable of itself, Speaking of anything but never of itself.
This polite bland man with his rather its ribbons and artificial flowers, with his smile and fine dressing cannot speak of himself. Whitman announces his rebellion against such annihilating conformity to artificial bounds. He wants to replace artificiality with nature and restraints with freedom. To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of nature!
He dreams of America as the great land of the openhanded, where men could speak freely to one another. In the prefatory essay to his Leaves of Grass Whitman was clear about the new content of American poetry.
Whitman kept true to this ideal. Throughout his poetry Whitman assumes the rebellious role of a prophet or a seer.
Whitman, Whitman threatens not only America, but also all symbols of oppression all over the world. At a time when sex was not allowed to be discussed in books or magazines Whitman called for a healthy sense of the relation between body and soul, and he discussed sexual joy and anguish.
He often celebrates it. This rich tradition of rebellion in American history and literature must have influenced Ginsberg and his fellow Beats. At least, it provided them with literary precedents and literary ancestors to identify with.
It also provides literary scholars and sociologists with a suitable context for studying the rebellion of Allen Ginsberg and his fellow writers. The American involvement in the Vietnam War was only one cause of protest. Soon there were thousands of popular demonstrations against the Vietnam affair.
By millions of Americans was beginning to feel that the war in Vietnam was not only useless but obscene and they took to the streets in protest. At the same time the universities were a scene of many violent confrontations, as students expressed their resistance to local university authorities and to the power of the state. Often the police confronted these demonstrations with violence.
To add to the scene of unrest, many minorities rose in active struggle demanding equality. Tired of empty declaration of principles and unfulfilled political promises, the black Americans tried to achieve equality in fact.
Starting with passive resistance, they moved in the sixties to revolutionary violence. The black community received encouragement and, sometimes, active cooperation from many white Americans, particularly the young. During this period there was also a wave of assassinations of political figures which intensified the sense of violence. President John F.
Kennedy was assassinated in November 22, During this period there was a radical change in the attitudes and life-styles of young people, a change which became a veritable social revolution.
There was a widespread rejection of traditional American values and a breaking down of established behavioral patterns. Many young people rejected almost completely the ideals, goals, and life-styles of their elders.
They banded together in attitudes —and often in active groups— to demonstrate their distrust of such traditional values as progress, education, material success and national pride. At the beginning both movements were ridiculed or, at least, neglected. But, gradually, these movements drew much attention and sympathy. It was not only the Vietnam War or the atom bomb.
The disaffection of those young people was also related to pervasive features of the social and economic order such as bureaucratic impersonality, material glut and waste, the feeling of being manipulated by advertising and publicity, alienation from work, rootlessness, existential aimlessness and the sense of powerlessness in the face of the large organizations that control American life.
The Beats were a group of writers who showed their rebellion against the whole ideological pattern of America both in word and in deed.
Many people, literary men and otherwise, felt a sense of identification with the Beats and shared their attitude and life-style. To this list literary critics add other writers who had been associated with the Beat writers by accident or affinity. This only reflects the affinities between these movements. In their work the Beat writers both inspired and depicted the Beat rebellion.
It was the way of life adopted by the Beats in their attempt to protest against the evils they perceived in America. The Beats were a revolt from the ideological, social, political and literary points of view.
Blasphemy and obscenity are expressions of their revolt and their search for beatitude. They had rationale for their unconventional life-style. By everything he does, the Beat —whether a writer or not— aims at three things: to show defiance of corrupt norms and values; to assert his individuality and discover authentic existence through intensified consciousness. The Beats rebelled against the middle class morality. John P. Many adult Americans attained prosperity and some degree of affluence for the first time in their lives.
These adults could well remember extreme poverty from the depression years. Instead of holding jobs, the Beats took to wandering. The theme of wandering occurs in many Beat novels and verse. The hero Dean Moriarty rushes madly about the country. Also wandering, for the Beats, was a way to direct experience which they preferred to formal education. To take to the road, thus, became a kind of initiation ritual and educational foray as well as a rebellion against middle-class values.
Those who attacked the Beat wanderers as leafers, hangers-on and parasites seem to have missed this point. Other ways of showing rebellion against middle-class values were sex and drugs.
The Beat tends to assert his sexuality, even homosexuality and to celebrate his use of drugs. Some critics highlight these aspects as only a symbol of defiance of middle-class norms. However the use of drugs served another aim —the expansion of consciousness. The Beats used drugs to alter the ordinary consciousness imposed upon them by society. Many Beat writers admitted that they often wrote under the influence of drugs. At the end of his novel Burroughs comments that the vision is a permanent alteration of consciousness that remains even when drugs are given up.
They rejected ordinary consciousness as corrupt or not effective and so unable to effect any social or political change. In his The Outsider, Colin Wilson asserts that dissatisfaction with the ordinary consciousness has always been a characteristic of all literary rebels. In contrast, the Beats sought an alternative consciousness. They sought knowledge of what it means to be human. However, what still seems strange is the other means they tried — speed, violence, excess and fascination with criminality and other states of different consciousness such as madness and childhood visions.
The ideal Beat is the one who moves all the time and moves fast. Speed recurs in many Beat novels and poems. Another method was excess. The Beats admired the excess in everything. The narrator of On the Road says: The only people for me are the mad ones.
The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.
Kerouac in all his writing and Ginsberg in Howl would argue for the superiority of those whom the law condemned. For the Beats, those people were the ones who dared to live their ideas, to experiment, though they were punished for it — in contrast to the people who only know about life from books.
The Beats also showed a deep interest in psychiatry and mental disorders. In the work of the Beats there is always the madhouse theme. They also took to Zen Buddhism and meditation in an attempt to alter their consciousness. The Beats, thus, were aware of the existence of two levels of consciousness: one which was imposed and fabricated, and another which they sought.
At the core of the Beat rebellion lies a single, simple, all-embracing desire to assert individuality and the value of the individual as a human being. In the s the concept of individuality was completely shattered in America. This was due to political reasons as well as to technology and industrialism. With the increasing rise in industry and materialism, technology and bureaucracy grew more fierce and began to devour everything human: creativity, individuality, whims and values: The American man felt he is manipulated, controlled and shaped to fit into the demands of the machine.
Commenting on the dangers of technology, Jacques Ellul says: It is necessary then, that technique prevail over the human being… [and] reduce man to a technical animal. The individual must be fashioned by techniques …, in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.
The fifties in America was also a period of great suspicion, repression and inhibition. The individual will and soul were repressed and controlled. The individual was hopeless and losing his identity. McCarthyism is a good example of this.
Although no evidence was produced, the Senator continued his campaign. The central figure in Naked Lunch is the Junkie, the weakest and most vulnerable of all citizens. Burroughs reflects the idea of control and magnifies its horror through the distorted lens of the junkie.
By keeping detached, living freely and developing an alternative ideology the Beats tried to free the individual from repression. The Beats are often described as anti-intellectuals. They prefer instinct and intuition to reason.
This may have led the Beats to promote disorder and randomness. Also the Beats believed in the primacy of instinct as the means of achieving true knowledge.
This explains for the attraction of the Beats towards Zen. Man must transcend rationality if he ever hopes to achieve wisdom. The rebellion against social norms, the rejection of the ordinary consciousness, control and reason make of the Beat movement both a social and an intellectual rebellion.
Yet theirs was a political rebellion as well; though many critics may not agree to this fact. With the strange exception of Kerouac, all Beat writers were opposed to the Vietnam War and joined demonstrations against it. Though he is opposed to any move to take it away from those who do.
This can be easily understood if we bear in mind that the Beats shared the European avant-garde belief that one radicalizes society by changing consciousness. This, they believed can be achieved only by changing the individual and his consciousness.
Charles A. Most commentators agree that by the mid-fifties the Beat movement had been largely superseded by the hippie counterculture. Yet, if we view the Beats as a cultural and social movement we can see a sameness with the counterculture. The hippie movement, thus, had its roots directly in the Beat rebellion. The hippies of the counterculture held the same Beat ideology and they even took things more far to the extreme.
They were more anti- official and anti-academic. Not certain that they intend to go into the business and professional worlds that swallow up the graduates of American universities, more and more hippies left universities to roam the streets.
The counterculture movement was also more anti-intellectual and the young rebels took more to the mystic and the visionary, as contrasted to the scientific and the technocrat.
The mystic, the occult and the magical formed a considerable part of the counterculture. On October 21, , fifty thousand protestors besieged the Pentagon to protest against the Vietnam War.
Besides the sit-downs, the speeches, and the marches, the central event of the day was an exorcism of the Pentagon by warlocks. For the first time spells and incantations replace the classic rhetoric of the radical tradition. The rebels of the counterculture distanced themselves more and more from the mainstream. They were highly regarded by the hippies and they shared in the countercultural activities and even gave assistance.
Recognizing the hippies as literal descendants of the Beats, Ginsberg saw them as the hope of America. He did much, his biographer Barry Miles says, to help the hippies and their countercultural activities: Acting as a central switchboard for the scene, Allen gave enormous assistance to the underground newspapers, doing benefits and interviews and providing contacts with like- minded people throughout America and the world.
He assumed the role of elder statesman of the counterculture, one of the few older people the hippies felt they could trust. Miles, , In the s and the few next decades America witnessed another rebellion. In this respect the Beat writers represent the main school of dissent. The critical pronouncements and the literary works of these schools show that in the s and the s there were several reactions against modernist values associated with the New Criticism.
Throughout the s and 50s New Criticism had a heavy influence which dominated the universities and the literary journals. William K. Wimsatt and M. At the same time the Modernist movement was already started by Pound and Eliot. The New Critics lent their intellectual authority to the Modernist poets. As critics and academics they encouraged Modernism and supported its orthodoxies. The New Critics ignored the new poets and forced them to adopt the New Critical views in writing.
The critical ideals which were intended for the assessment of poetry were widely misunderstood to be guidelines for the writing of poetry. The New Critics imposed their influence on some literary works even during composition.
Academic poets working according to the New Critical ideas found a ready market for their verse and were welcomed by literary magazines, while it was difficult for new writers to find a publisher. Kerouac who wrote On the Road in , could not have it published until and his Visions of Cody, completed by did not appear in its entirety for another two decades. The new writers did not surrender to the demands of the New Critics to have their work published.
The difference between the modernists and the poets of the open form is not only a question of different literary tastes. Rather, it is due to the different concepts each side held about the function of poetry, the role of the poet and the nature of reality.
The Beats, for instance, distrusted conventional form in writing. This distrust reflects their equally profound distrust of formal codes of behaviour. While the New Critics insisted on formal qualities such as correct grammar, logic, regular meter, rhyme, stanzas, coherence and control; the open form favoured immediacy, spontaneity and freedom.
The difficulty of this style, they felt, would make poetry understood by an elite few. Also the impersonality of the modernist style was, for them, a barrier between the poet and the reader. The Beats rejected the New Critical belief that the poem is an end in itself. For them, the poet was a sage. He might speak as a prophet, denouncing the evils of America and preaching a new way of life. It should play the same role as that of consciousness-expanding drugs. This practice forced the Modernists to become wholly dependent on literary allusions and symbols; and so their poetry became increasingly remote, intellectual and withdrawn.
The Beats, on the other hand, challenged this concept with its tendency towards abstraction, by making personality the centre of the poem. Thus, the open-form poetry extended the subject matter of poetry to more extreme areas: insanity, sex, divorce or alcoholism. Another target of attack was the New Critical concept of intelligence and wit. It is also false to the instantaneousness and uncertainty of life. So they preferred spontaneity and, believing in the sacredness of their inspiration, they preferred not to revise what they write.
Kerouac attacked revision as a kind of secondary moral censorship imposed by the unconscious, and he compared the writer to the jazz saxophonist in search of language as an undisturbed flow from the mind. The danger in improvisation is apparent. The poet would not make effort to re-structure his perceptions into an artistic entity. Also there could be no distinction between what is art and what is life.
The unconscious has a logic of its own and in certain cases …, this logic can operate to produce genuine art. They carefully dated each poem to show that it records only the moment of its writing. Consequently, the versification of the open form is more free than that of modernism. The poetry of the open form depended on less rhyme and rarely used regular stanzas or metrics.
Those poets sought physiological justification for the line breaks. In their rebellion against their direct predecessors, the writers of the open form revived some ancient tradition. They celebrated Whitman and Mark Twain. They also identified with neglected figures like Williams and Pound who began to outgrow the Modernist mode and whose Paterson and Cantos, respectively, challenged the prevalence of traditional metres and stanzas and cleared the ground for an alternative to the symbolist poetics of the Modernists.
Yet he admits his debt to particular individuals: poets, friends and artists. Blake had, it may be said, a transforming influence on Ginsberg.
Blake sought free self- expression and immediate responsiveness from the impulse as opposed to inhibition and repression. Repeatedly in his work, Blake shows indifference to moral issues when self-expression is at stake.
This is clear in his confession of the most embarrassing aspects of his life in his poetry. In lovely copulation, bliss on bliss, with Theotormon. Both poets call upon traditional literary rebels such as the Old Testament prophets. Thus, Blake argues that the way to truth is the rebellious commitment and the extreme way of living. Excess of joy weeps. Through his extremity and apparent libertinism Blake was searching for far-out experiences in which things are no longer ordinary restrictive reality.
Blake exalts the value of the intensified perception rather than institutional discipline as a way to the truth. It sent him in a long terrifying journey with drugs, sex, and meditation and even to India and Japan. The beginning was a series of visions he experienced under the influence of Blake.
In the summer of , Ginsberg was living in his Harlem flat. Suddenly he heard what the believed to be the voice of Blake reading the poem for him. This auditory apparition produced a sudden visual realization. Ginsberg was, at the moment, looking at the sky. The sky seemed very ancient.
In his heightened state of awareness, he looked at the cornices of the building and noticed that in very corner: … where I looked evidences of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. Some hands had placed them there — that some hand placed the whole universe in front of me … or that God was in front of my eyes — existence itself was God. The bricks and cornices of the building took a supernatural glow. In other words a breakthrough from ordinary habitual quotidian consciousness into consciousness that was really seeing eternity in a flower … heaven in a grain of sand.
As I was seeing heaven in the cornices of the building. Ginsberg felt that the repetitive sounds of the rhymes caused him completely to lose all sense of his body, normal time, and normal consciousness. Looking again at the cornices of the old building he realized that his consciousness has been changed and that now he could see ordinary reality as a compendium of infinite, sublime meanings. But these are in no way devotional poems. It took me half an hour to read it, and I felt exhausted afterwards.
Reading and appreciating Ginsberg is a highly subjective and insular experience, for the stream of consciousness and holw imagery employed by the poet can only be fully digested by someone with a similar set of experiences. Howl, Kaddish and America were my favourites and I urge everyone planning on reading this and anyone who has read this to listen to Allen reading his poetry on YouTube.
He left me wanting more. Find your local bookstore at booksellers. To help us recommend your next book, tell us what you enjoy reading. I am always fascinated by writers who break taboos; writers who are unapologeticly themselves. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom later became leading figures of the Beat movement. You definitely get a grander feeling when the words are vocalized.
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