Ginsberg addressing Whitman

The poetry of Walt Whitman has inspired centuries of authors since its conception in the 19^th-century, but, none are so moving as the Beat poets. The Beat authors came as a result of the counterculture the United States was experiencing in the late 1950’s and almost the entirety of the 1960’s; they wrote literature for those who were sick of the destructive and ignorant attitude of American politics at the time. Out of the Beat authors, one of the ones who has really stood the test of time and become and icon for the cultural movement is Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg has a couple seminal works that define his generation’s anger, and although all of his works have similar style and content to that of Whitman, his poem “America” directly addresses Whitman and the irony of a Whitmanian view of America in his lifetime.

Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America” has an overwhelmingly similar style to that of Whitman because of the stream-of-consciousness that the poets utilize in their works. The style of writing means exactly what one might suppose, writing down one thought following the next no matter their rhyme or relation to one another, but the collection of lines usually make sense as they are all connected to one central thought. Ginsberg starts his poem off, “America I’ve given you all and now I am nothing. / America two dollars and twentyseven cents Jauary 17, 1956. / I can’t stand my own mind. / America when will we end the human war? / Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb / I don’t feel good don’t bother me.” The “streaming” nature of the writing style of Ginsberg is unmistakable, all thoughts linked by the fact that America has not returned to Ginsberg what he has given it. Whitman has also directly addressed America, both of the writers really addressing the romanticized concept of America, but demonstrates a much more optimistic vision in his poem “America,” he writes “Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, / All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old…Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love…” From the minimally lined poem, it is clear that the stream-of-consciousness exists, but more so than that the picture of America is vastly different. Whitman talks about America as a center for hope and success, as much of the thinkers at the time talked about their American vision. Ginsberg paints a picture of America, that of disdain, mistrust, and contemplation over the oppression he feels from the government. Later in Ginsberg’s poem, he directly addresses Whitman with the line “It occurs to me that I am America. / I am talking to myself again.” Although Whitman never exactly says the words “I am America,” Whitman will frequently place his own identity inside of other people, and addresses what I would consider to be an extremely inclusive idea of what makes up American people. Further, Whitman frequently mentions in his poetry that it is written for future generations to come, and imagines people hundreds of years in the future studying his work; for that reason, I think Ginsberg included the phrase “I am talking to myself again,” to remind the romantic predecessors that their poetry, during its conception, is between the author and the page and not for contributing to a grandiose vision of “America”. Ginsberg utilized pro-American Whitmanian rhetoric to show how destitute America had become in the Beat era.

I have included a link to a poem also written by Allen Ginsberg titled “A Supermarket in California” in which Ginsberg directly speaks to Whitman, by name. What I love about the poem is how much it humanizes Whitman and his writing. It is easy to romanticize Whitman’s words and persona, as he has had such an impact and lived so long ago, but thinking of him in terms of a person at a grocery store is an interesting take on his legacy.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47660/a-supermarket-in-california