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Howl 45
(Ezra Pound), mid-century poets were playing it safe. The issue
was Ginsberg’s poetics. The prizing of spontaneity, which may in
part have come out of Whitman (“Spontaneous Me” was one of
Whitman’s titles), came for Ginsberg more conspicuously out of jazz,
out of the automatic writing experiments of the French surrealists,
out of Japanese aesthetics such as brush painting, and especially out
of the Buddhist idea, often quoted by Ginsberg, “first thought, best
thought.” 7 This approach can lead, as it certainly did for Whitman, to
fatuity, obviousness, and rhetorical excess: this is the risk one takes. In
the context of a critical establishment whose leading lights included
John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren,
Howl was initially seen as having no poetic merit at all (it did get
attention, owing to the court case and to the growing awareness that
there was a “beat generation” and that Ginsberg was its poetic voice). It
was said to be loose, obscene, adolescent, pretentious, and amateurish.
At best these critics saw it (and Ginsberg to some extent encouraged
the view) as the “raw” pole of the raw-vs.-cooked binary opposition
popular at the time—i.e. the open vs. the closed, the improvisatory vs.
the formal. Marjorie Perloff has argued that this is pure mythology,
since Ginsberg “was probably a much truer modernist than were
mandarin poets like Louis Simpson or Donald Hall” (29–30). Howl
can hardly be said to have given up formalism either; given “the use of
biblical strophes, tied together by lavish anaphora and other patterns
of repetition” (Perloff 30) and given the highly artificial nature of
Ginsberg’s language—its oxymorons and incongruities, its ellipses
and syntactic distortions—no one should mistake it for “unformed
speech” as critics have charged (Perloff 35). More than 50 years later,
there is still no shortage of critics who see Howl as, at best, representative
of a period in American culture, and therefore of social or cultural
more than of literary interest.
In the end, it is the language of the body that is most taboo. The
poet Mark Doty describes hearing Ginsberg read at various points in
his career, the last time at a Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, on
Teachers’ Day, in 1996.
It’s maybe six months before his death, but Allen’s in fine
and sweetly energetic form, reading/ chanting his late, playful
chants—“don’t smoke, don’t smoke, suck cock, suck cock”—and
everyone just loves him. (12)