Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

44
Allen Ginsberg
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture,
not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. (35)
Ginsberg, invoking Whitman, often talked of the voice and the breath.
The titles Howl and Song both participate in an oral trope, though
Howl suggests a sound more painful and frightening than a “song,”
less a celebration than an agony. We see how deeply the oral trope is
woven into and performed by Song of Myself, with its many performative
vocal sounds ( “belch’d,” “blab,” “yawp,” “lull,” “hum “), most of
them onomatopoeic and without etymology. These words—and the
desire to hear “not music or rhyme,” “not custom or lecture,” no matter
how good those may be, but rather the pre-semantic “hum of your
valved voice”—represent attempts to reach a space prior to language.
Whitman is performing or describing the process of an unmediated
vocalizing. Finally, when he writes, “What living and buried speech
is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum . . .” (39),
he seems to be both describing his own effort to disinter (a metaphor
that substitutes for denuding) this primal vitality and foreshadowing
Ginsberg’s parallel effort.
Though Whitman’s work was the Song of Myself, he made it clear
that he meant to speak for many, as Ginsberg also purports to do,
from the first line of Howl and through the many subordinate clauses
beginning “who. . . .” In Whitman’s poem, the role of the medium for
repressed content is most clear:
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generation of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and
dwarfs,
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d. (57)
The appeal to uninhibited, even pre-semantic utterance—belches,
howls, yawps, hums, and more—suggests the other taboo that Howl
and Other Poems conspicuously broke at a time when, far from
continuing the modernists’ iconoclastic program of “make it new”