Both Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg reimagine what America could be in their poetical and literary endeavors, and Whitman’s influence on Ginsberg runs infinitely through our culture, shaping the fabric of America. Whitman wrote, “I celebrate...

Through a careful interpretation of A Defense of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Democratic Vistas by Walt Whitman, one can gain a holistic sense of poetry, what it is and what it does, that can be applied to literary texts of all times. One...

Generations of readers and critics alike have denigrated the works of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, both equally brilliant poets, separated by a century, yet sharing a poetic vision of both political and sexual freedom, simply because the...

Allen Ginsberg's poetry reflects both the era in which he began to write it and the psychedelia that allowed him to accept his own work as an expression of a higher truth. Usage of the word "psychedelia" refers not only to psychedelic drugs, such...

In “A Supermarket in California,” Allen Ginsberg uses the American supermarket as an extended metaphor for a poet’s mind and experiences. In this supermarket of the mind, the poet can select images and inspirations much as one would search for...

In interpretations of Allen Ginsberg's “Howl,” it is common to find the assertion that this wild three-part poem is a diatribe against the evils of capitalism, personified in the poem as the ancient, child-devouring god Moloch. Marjorie Perloff's...

Michael Runmaker argued that Ginsberg’s "Howl" espoused “hysterical language” and “non-exact vocal,” making this poem antithetical to qualities such as “resonance, historical associations, beauty, or rightness for the particular context” which...

With the advent of both modernism and post-modernism, the twentieth century was a time in which poetic expression was extremely diverse. Especially in the aftermath of World War Two, poets sought to widen the scope of their craft; they...

In his 1956 poem ‘Howl’ Allen Ginsberg portrays a vision of America that is simultaneously both apocalyptic and somewhat hopeful of the future. Ginsberg, one of the primary figures of the counterculture of Beat Writers during the 1940s and 50s,...

It is not a surprise that Allen Ginsberg aligned himself with Walt Whitman in his poem “Howl,” as the title page to his book of the same name reads, “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” (Ginsberg 1)....

The trope of madness and the figure of the madman are notions that have for centuries fascinated, horrified, and perplexed Western culture. Considerations of madness have influenced myriad literary narratives, starting with the madness of...

1950s America was a turbulent and changing time for its inhabitants; the combined forces of the post-Depression period, the looming fear of communism and the Soviet Union, the back end of the Second World War and with it a growing need for...

A Kaddish is a traditional Jewish funeral prayer which has five sections. In his poem “Kaddish,” Allen Ginsberg retells the true horrors of Naomi Ginsberg’s life, descension into psychotic collapse, and death but slowly begins to find a sense of...