Tropical ginsberg

16
poetry as a new “revolutionary force,” and personal involvement with
socio-political issues would become the solid ground for the 1960s
engageé counterculture. Many ideals Ginsberg praised and wrote about
in the 1950s later on resonated on some protests of the engageé
counterculture of the 1960s, ideals like participatory democracy,
egalitarianism, collective growth, and communal love.
Ginsberg’s poetry, as well Beat poetry, “connected aesthetic and
political concerns, rejecting the academic impersonality of the New
Criticism.” 11 The same annulment of the individual that could be seen in
the American military industrial society of the 1950s reflected on the
dominant trend of literary criticism of the time, New Criticism.
According to James Breslin, John Crowe Ransom’s essay, “Poetry: A
Note to Ontology” (1938), and Allen Tate’s essay, “Tension in Poetry”
(1938), were somewhat cornerstones of the New Criticism, as they
“articulated the movement’s theoretical foundations.” 12 Breslin argues
that Ransom and Tate made a clear distinction between,
Prose (or science), which is rational, abstract, and
manipulative, and poetry (or art), which blended
thinking and feeling in a seamless whole. A poem
was thus […] a self-enclosed space that
transcended personal, social, political biases and
affirmed imaginitive activity as disinterested. 13
Breslin goes on to say that the theory behind the emerging New
Criticism “privileged the brief, intense, ironically self-conscious lyric; it
excluded the discursive, narrative, spontaneous, passionate, comitted.” 14
As poetry gradually became more and more impersonal and
academic, the social connotation of the poet lost a lot of its power. The
romantic figure of the poet as someone like Rimbaud, young, with big
starry eyes that seem to stare at the horizon, and whose verses could
enchant people with its fluctuating connectivity of ideas, was long gone.
The post-war poet was a highly educated, bourgeois type, whose lines
were meticulously created. American post-war poetry became an art of
11
Farell, James J. The Spirit of The Sixties: Making Post War Radicalism. New York:
Routledge Publishing. 1997. 58
12 ND
Breslin, James E. B. et al., A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. 2 Volume.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. 1987. p.1080
13
Ibid
14 Ibid.