Allen Ginsberg’s "America"

By Jennifer McNally

 

Before the "hippies" of the 1960s, there were the so-called beatniks of the 50s and the leading-lights of the beatnik generation including writers such as William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg (Foster 1). The writing of this group expressed resistance to academic poetry and to the conservative values and politics that characterized American culture in the 1950s (Foster 3).

Ginsberg's poem "America" is a perfect example of the rage that the Beat writers felt toward the state of American culture in the 1950s and early 1960s. Structurally the poem is conversational in tone. Ginsberg once said that "America" was an "attempt to make combination of short and long lines, very long lines and very short lines" (Foster 106). The tone of this poem also gives the impression of being completely spontaneous (Merrill 65). It is "whimsical, ad, comic, tedious, honest, bitter, impatient and, yet, somehow, incisive" (Merrill 65). The narrator's conversation appears to figure out that it is in reality a monologue and then "drifts off," muttering all the while against a hypothetical national alter ego (Merrill 65).

Yet underneath it all, the turbulence and irrational ranting, is a broad-cased attack against traditional American values. The apparent hopeless illogic of the poem becomes analogous to the hopeless illogic of the country that the poem represents (Merrill 65). First and foremost in this poem is the feeling of disillusionment and alienation as the exuberant optimism expressed by Ginsberg's hero, Walt Whitman becomes soured and is released (Merrill 65). Ginsberg writes, "America I've given you all and now I'm nothing". This admission is balanced later in the poem by an appeal to the country to "shake off" its hypocrisy and self absorption and become equal to Whitman's challenge (Merrill 65).

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I'm sick of your insane demands.

It is also possible to see a Zen-influenced antagonism toward the striving and competitive nature of American culture when Ginsberg refers to his obsession with "Time" magazine (Merrill 66).

I'm addressing you.

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie

producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

As can be seen in this stanza, Ginsberg begins by addressing the country, but ends the stanza by realizing that since he is a part of America, he is talking to himself. In this way, the poet becomes both the narrator and the protagonist, as the one addressed. The poem continues with this sort of jerky dialogue that is "full of shifting issues" (Merrill 66).

The protest voiced in this poem comes not just from the words. It also comes from the structure. The "scattered irritations and objections" are simply "instrumental caprice," as it is the "total bewilderment and confusion" that one feels in reading the poem ńrather then the validity of the attacksóthat forces the reader to consider and appreciation the American dilemma that Ginsberg is attempting to reflect (Merrill 66). The point that Ginsberg is appears to be trying to make is that the America of the twentieth century is far different than that of Whitman's. There is no longer room for individuality when everyone gets their ideas from the media.

What is fascinating about this poem is the way in which Ginsberg mirrors the insanity of the Cold War era, while simultaneously reflecting the insanity of a country that claimed to be the "home of the free," while keeping minorities oppressed.

America it's them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take

our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our

auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations.

That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.

Of course, Ginsberg is drawing on irony in these lines to stress the ludicrous nature in which, a Communist take over the country would have been, most probably, an improvement for the civil rights situations of minorities.

When one looks back at the atrocities committed against minorities during the Civil Rights movement, and contrasts this with the conservative hypocrisy of the American middle class, it is easy to see the source of Ginsberg's rage. It was a time of conformity, in which the rights of the individual were taking a backseat to matters of national security such as the "police action" conflicts that took young American lives, and the determined oppression of anyone who was not white, male and Protestant. The average reader can, therefore, identify with the moral confusion and anger that is expressed in this Ginsberg poem. However, looking over the bulk of Ginsberg's poetry, and in particular the sexually oriented poetry, and Ginsberg parts company with the majority of the American populace.

Ginsberg has been praised as a pioneer in the gay-rights movement. While gays deserve their civil rights as much as anyone, critic Norman Podhoretz is one of the few who have pointed out that "no one thought to draw a connection between the emergence of AIDS and the rampant homosexual promiscuity promoted by Ginsberg" (28). Additionally, while Ginsberg's stance for gay rights is not objectionable, what is most assuredly objectionable is the fact that Ginsberg was a long-standing member of the North American Man Boy Love Alliance, an organization that is devoted to the legalization of homosexual pedophilia (Podhoretz 30). While it is right, just, understandable, and laudable to rage against the plastic and artificial nature of American culture in the 1950s and 60s -- and to advocate civil rights for gays, blacks, and other minorities, it is not right to insist that society errs in protecting the rights of children to be guarded against the sexual advances of adults. In that, Ginsberg went too far, and, this political stance infuriates me so completely that it colors my reactions to all of Ginsberg's work.

  

Works Cited

Foster, Edward H. Understanding the Beats (Columbia, South Carolina: University of

South Carolina Press, 1992).

Ginsberg, Allen. "America,".

Merrill, Thomas F. Allen Ginsberg (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988).

Podhoretz, Norman. "My war with Allen Ginsberg," Commentary, v104 (1997): August, pp. 27-40.