Ginsberg and the Beats

Reading poetry by Allen Ginsberg silently to oneself is like watching a movie with the sound turned off. Ginsberg’s poems are as much songs to be sung aloud or speeches to be emphatically voiced or even skits to be acted out as they are words to be read on a page. His use of authentic American dialect and speech patterns (much like Robert Frost or Samuel Clemens used) works to bring his words as easily and smoothly to the lips of his readers as to their minds.

That said, I was a little disappointed with the poem selected for this anthology. Kral Majales is effective (especially in the second half with the repetition of “I am the King of May” before each new thought), but for some reason it’s just not one of my favorites. Nevertheless, it does show the typical expression of irony, anger, and loneliness found in most of his poetry, and it takes on the intimate, almost confessional tone popularized by the apparent movement of writers in the ’50s first to the psychiatrist’s office and then directly to the typewriter to share their most private findings with the world at large.

My favorite poem of Ginsberg’s is one that doesn’t actually show up in the anthology: the classic America. In America, Ginsberg admits, “I smoke marijuana every chance I get. / … When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.” Whatever else you may think of them, the pure honesty of the Beats has to be admired. The perfectly open and candid dialogue between the author and his reader proves effective not only in sharing personal details, but also in addressing much larger issues, such as political and social protestation and commentary. Ginsberg grew up in a politically charged household with communist socialist parents, Jewish emigrants from Russia. He was instilled with a strong faith in the power for change to be found in rhetorical protest, and it certainly seems that this belief shines through in his radically politically-minded poetry. At times, he will directly state his solution to a crisis he observes (“America when will you send your eggs to India?”), and, at other times, he seems to know that all he can do about the problem is bring it out into the open (“America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.”), which he was never afraid to do, even during the era of McCarthyism and enforced conformity.

Proving their worth in literary history, Ginsberg and the rest of the Beats wrote about what was real. They wrote the truth as they saw it, and nothing was too sacred for their exploration—be it politics, American values, sex, drugs, war, their own lives, their secrets, their fears, or their loves.

In the line, “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love”, Ginsberg reflects the feeling that our most human values—love, compassion, wonder—are threatened and even on the verge of extinction in our unfeeling, impassive modern culture. To me, at least, this sentiment (among others) illuminates how the social criticism of the Beats in the ’50s led directly to the humanist movements of the Hippies in the ’60s.