Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

42
Allen Ginsberg
“negro streets” of Howl’s second line drew the young Ginsberg in the
same way that rap music today pulls white boys out of the stupefying
suburbs. 6 Kerouac, in the same vein, writes that “the only people for
me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad
to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who
never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn, burn, burn like
fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars
and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody
goes ‘Awww!’ ” (5). “Madness,” in this sense, was freedom and a sense
of wonder, as well as a way of critiquing Bob Dylan’s “Mister Jones,”
who just doesn’t know what’s happening. Ginsberg said to Kerouac,
in 1948, “I really will go mad and that’s what I half hope for” (qtd. in
Raskin 83). Ginsberg may have glamorized real madness—pathology,
suicide, failure—but much of the time “the mad ones” means the wild,
the visionary, and the uninhibited.
Explicit sexual description or reference to bodily functions has
been the chief grounds for censorship in the twentieth century. This
was true in the cases of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller,
and those of many lesser known authors. The most egregious passage
of this kind in Howl reads:
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off
the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,
and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors,
caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the evenings in rose-gardens and the grass of
public
parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may. . . . (13)
The “saintly motorcyclists” of “Howl” are from “The Wild One”
with Marlon Brando. Standing perhaps in Brando’s place, Ginsberg’s
friend Neal Cassady was the handsome, charismatic, car-stealing hero
of both Kerouac’s On the Road, published in 1957, and Howl. For
Ginsberg, Cassady was the living metaphor for energy, nonconformity,
and priapic excess. In 1958, in “Many Loves,” Ginsberg calls Cassady