Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Howl 47
epitome of the freed libido; the raw vs. the cooked; the naked, the
unmediated, in both form and content.
Eventually “mainstream” culture and literature made a place for
adversarial culture, as has happened so often in U.S. history. Even
Lionel Trilling, Ginsberg’s professor at Columbia, who hadn’t liked
Ginsberg’s work at all, included two poems (“Supermarket in California”
and “To Aunt Rose”) in his 1967 textbook The Experience of
Literature. Today of course there is no mainstream twentieth-century
American poetry anthology that omits Ginsberg; the big ones
(Norton, for example) usually printing “Howl” in its entirety. In 1986,
Harper and Row brought out the original draft facsimile edition of
Howl, modeled after the facsimile edition of Eliot’s The Waste Land,
in which Ginsberg explained everything one could possibly want to
know about the allusions in the poem, the stages of revision, and the
author’s life during the process of composition. But, with complete
absorption into the culture, can Howl still be fresh, transgressive, and
revolutionary? It would seem that a breakthrough cannot keep being
a breakthrough. Once the shattered icons are lying on the floor, you
can’t keep shattering them. For Sven Birkerts, seeing Ginsberg in the
1970s was a disappointment:
[I]t hardly helped matters that the poet himself, that fierce
icon breaker, had grown into an avuncular pop icon, all finger
cymbals and rolling waves of “Ommmm” that I could not take
seriously. And as the years passed, his great outburst acquired
its crown of thorny footnotes and worked its way into the
canon, the Moloch imprecations sidling up to Walt Whitman’s
“barbaric yawp.” (81)
For Birkerts, this was the last straw: it was now possible to read
“Howl” in class.
But text is made oppositional by a context. That means that Howl
may be oppositional again. And so it came to pass: in the 1980s Jerry
Falwell’s conservative Christian “Moral Majority” began recruiting
members by identifying “obscene” or “indecent” literature that they
thought should be prohibited. (Since “obscene had been difficult to
define in court, they settled on “indecent” as the best term with which
to lobby.) The Heritage Foundation and senator Jesse Helms found
this a perfect opportunity to inveigh against “smut” and indecency