Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

38
Allen Ginsberg
exuberant tone, long lines, and catalogues; the sheer length of Song of
Myself and Howl; the collapsing of binary oppositions (soul/body, man/
woman, high/low, and others); and the celebration of male camaraderie,
both in the homoerotic sense and—in Whitman’s case—more often in
a spiritualized sense as a remedy for the ills of society. 1 (Whitman was
prophetic on this point, as the Civil War demonstrated.)
At the time that the San Francisco district attorney attempted to
censor Howl, there was still a ban in place on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady
Chatterley’s Lover as well as The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Thus,
words like “cunt,” “snatch,” “cock,” “fuck,” and others in Howl were
likely included to call attention to the poem, and they did. At the
trial Jake Erlich, the lead attorney for the ACLU, defended the word
“fuck,” quoting groundbreaking precedent in the trial of James Joyce’s
Ulysses. He also quoted Christopher Marlow’s sixteenth-century poem
“Ignato,” which ends with the poet stating that he loves the woman to
whom the poem is addressed because “zounds I can fuck thee soundly”
(trial transcript, qtd. in Morgan 189).
But as the trial transcripts reveal, it was not principally four-letter
words that concerned the authorities. Howl’s transgressions were (and
are) many—sexual, social, aesthetic, religious, and political. Ginsberg’s
declarations of ethnicity, homosexuality, drug use, and Communist
sympathies in both “Howl” and “Kaddish” occurred at a time when
these identities and practices were virtually unmentionable. At the
same time, Ginsberg’s humor and self-parody helped to deflate the
repressive power against which “Howl” was especially directed.
In the “tranquilized fifties,” as poet Robert Lowell described
the decade, American society was ensconced in suburban comfort,
conformity, and the official ideology of containment. It was the era
of anti-communism and Senator Joe McCarthy, and the U.S. government
regarded writers in general as dangerous and seditious. As Jonah
Raskin writes, “Hollywood directors and writers were jailed. Irish
poet Dylan Thomas was investigated by the FBI and begrudgingly
issued a visa. Arthur Miller was denied a passport and not allowed
to leave the United States for years. Dashiell Hammett, the author of
The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, was sent to prison for refusing
to knuckle under to investigators and name names” (5). As for the
beat generation, Burroughs wrote Junkie under a pseudonym, no one
would publish Jack Kerouac from 1950–1955, and Howl, of course,