The Patriot Poets: American Odes, Progress Poems, and the State of the Union

“America, You Made Me Want to Be a Saint”

Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”

Ginsberg’s “Howl” is revered and reviled as the cultural icon of a movement, the event of an age, or (as he called it) an “elegy for the generation” (Ginsberg, Letters, 121). It has been talked about, smothered in the trappings of scholarship (much of it generated by Ginsberg himself), and even on occasion analyzed as a poem. It is fixed in the American canon. Ginsberg’s admirers see “Howl” as a sharp break from an older, more confining academicism. But Ginsberg was never – pace Norman Podhoretz and other detractors – anti-intellectual or even anti-academic. Marjorie Perloff, in an essay that I fault only for being too short, argues that “Howl” springs in a direct line from modernism and emphasizes its complexity of figurative language and its richness of irony and comedic detachment (24–43). In the present context, however, “Howl” presents itself as a dark underside to Melvin Tolson’s technologically driven Marxist utopia. Densely allusive and literary, it forms a bleak dystopian terminus to a long series of prophetic American progress poems.

Ginsberg’s critics sometimes stress his Jewishness in relation to the prophetic voice he developed in his poetry. But in his “America,” he professes a desire to become “a saint.” This secular, politically subversive, homosexual Jew made an implausible candidate for sainthood; but his cry ties him, as he well understood, firmly back to the Protestant origins of New England with its dream of a community of saints working to realize God’s will on earth. Even his habits of speech reflect it: he refers to the Hebrew Bible as “the Old Testament” (Letters, 141); he describes “Howl” as an attempt to “justify,” using the vocabulary of Milton’s Puritan theology (Howl: Original Facsimile, xi). In Justin Quinn’s analysis, however, Ginsberg’s community of saints is a society of antinomians. “Howl” is the most prominent twentieth-century example of Sacvan Bercovitch’s tradition of the jeremiad, or, as he labelled it, “anti-jeremiad.” Bercovitch, revising Perry Miller, laid the emphasis not on the writer’s denunciation of society’s sinful backsliding but on the “unshakable optimism” of the writer’s faith in “the inviolability of the colonial cause.”1 Ginsberg shifts the emphasis back. His Moloch-driven America is beyond redemption, as he withdraws into the sanctuary of the bughouse. If it is the Nekuia of the epic quest, as Catherine Davies suggests, it is a picture of America as Hades, not the millennial Holy City of Zion.² However, as Paul Breslin observes, Ginsberg is not only the radical child of his time but its disciple as well (Psycho-Political Muse, 22). An ideal America still survives by implication in his lines, and there is lingering hope for the betterment of the nation.

“Howl” is heir to the formative influences that generated the American progress poem. Most near at hand is the “Old Left” thinking of his parents, his mother Naomi’s communism, his father Louis’s more moderate socialism.³ This is the Depression-era thinking that had produced Benét’s “Ode to Walt Whitman,” Mike Gold’s “Ode to Walt Whitman,” and MacLeish’s “America Was Promises” – poems that Ginsberg, had he spoken of them, would surely have rejected as too soft. Ginsberg at home was steeped in this milieu, but he came to maturity just as American conservatives were rewriting the 1930s.

Ginsberg looked farther back to more respectable ancestors, preferring to be named with Kit Smart rather than, say, Kenneth Fearing (Ginsberg, Selected Interviews, 20). His lifelong preoccupation with Blake is well known, as is his experience of the “auditory hallucination” of Blake’s voice (36–7). He does not tell us whether Blake’s accent was Broad Street or Brooklyn, but Blake’s presence haunts this entire American tradition as a kind of auditory hallucination. The poet of “America: A Prophecy” (1793), born of the same Dissenter stock that populated the New World, is audible in Joel Barlow, who personally befriended Blake’s patron William Hayley. Decades later, Walt Whitman was surprised to receive a letter from England from one Annie Gilchrist, widow of Blake’s first biographer Alexander Gilchrist. She had read Whitman’s poems and, recognizing a sympathetic soul, wrote to the American poet proposing marriage, sight unseen. Whitman courteously declined.

Ginsberg in his exchange of letters with Richard Eberhart, one of the first sympathetic readers outside his own circle, insists that the point of “Howl” is not “destructive or negative.” It is instead – echoing Blake – about “our suppression of natural ecstasy (as in Whitman, Crane)” (MS 154). His liberation of “natural ecstasy” is in the first place erotic – a liberation of sexual, and particularly homosexual, expression. This expression is literal and orgasmic, but it is also erotic in the broader figurative sense, as it is in Blake and in Whitman. “The special meaning of the ‘Calamus’ cluster of Leaves of Grass,” remarked Whitman dryly in 1876, “mainly resides in its political significance.” As David S. Reynolds notes, Whitman’s notion was part of a more widely held view that “the health of the nation depended vitally on love between friends” (Whitman’s America, 401) or, in Whitman’s words, “the sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west.”4 Ginsberg’s identification with the queer Whitman – “dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher” – is total.⁵ Both struggled to resolve the democratic paradox of the individual and the collective that Whitman sets at the very beginning of Leaves of Grass, the tension between the “simple separate person” and “the word En-Masse” (see 6–7). In Whitman’s era, when homosexuality was not a recognized category, expressions of male love were open and commonplace. But in the 1950s, when it was stigmatized and persecuted, when even the ACLU refused explicit support (a policy not reversed until 1967) (Davies, Whitman’s Queer Children, 81), the formation of gay subcultures was a natural defence, as in the sociopolitical scene of the San Francisco Beats and the micropolitics of Frank O’Hara’s New York City Odes (1960).⁶ As Gregory Woods reminds us, Ginsberg’s courageous outing of his sexuality is not only a personal victory but a political challenge (Articulate Flesh, xx). A vital part of the political meaning of “Howl” lies here.

Ginsberg identified as well with the queer poète maudit Hart Crane, whose spectral presence in “Howl,” not as strong as Blake’s or Whitman’s, is still palpable. Ginsberg seems to think of Crane as a splendid but tragic failure, both as an unfulfilled gay man and as a political poet of America. In his letters, he speaks of “Hart Crane at last moments of knowledge before he hit water” (Letters, 73), and “the shining pathos in inchoate awareness at the end of Crane’s Bridge” (61). Ginsberg, however, seems surprisingly oblivious to the link between Whitman and Crane that Allen Tate was so quick to point out: “The equivalent of Whitman in the economic and moral aspect of America in the last sixty years,” Tate lamented, “is the high-powered industrialism that you, no less than I, feel is a menace to the spiritual life of this country” (Unterecker, Voyager, 621). Whitman’s celebration of technology in “Passage to India” and the great New York Exposition of 1871, and Crane’s neo-futurist insistence on poetry of the machine, his sacramental exaltation of the engineering of Brooklyn Bridge, his mythic Whitman gaping in wonder at the aeronautics of Kitty Hawk, are strangely discordant with Ginsberg’s Moloch.

Hart Crane, it is true, vigorously defended Whitman against Tate’s accusation: “[Since] you, like so many others, never seem to have read his Democratic Vistas and other of his statements sharply decrying the materialism, industrialism etc. of which you name him the guilty and hysterical spokesman, there isn’t much use in my tabulating the qualified, yet persistent reasons I have for my admiration of him” (Unterecker, Voyager, 623; Crane, Letters 1916–1932, 353–4). In Democratic Vistas, we do find Whitman’s tirades against American society: our “unprecedented materialistic advancement” is “canker’d, crude.” It is “saturated in corruption.” It threatens “to eat us up, like a cancer.” And yet, as Bercovitch notes, Whitman’s ideal America never contradicts the gildedage American reality that he sees: “The extreme business energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States,” Whitman claims, “are parts of amelioration and progress.” “My theory includes riches, and the amplest products, power, activity, inventions, etc. Upon them, as upon substrata, I raise the edifice design’d in these Vistas” (Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 198–9). Ginsberg, like Crane, is blind to this element of the post-bellum Whitman.

Before Ginsberg began forming ideas for “Howl,” he thought of his poetry as personal, lyrical, and only in the process of writing did he find he could be a political poet. “I never saw the possibility of political poetry before,” he wrote to his brother in August 1954, “but the international political situation seems to me to have at last palpably revealed its final necessary relation to moral or spiritual justice.” He saw an America “lost in a mad dream of plastic lampshades.” “There’s an obvious relation between the evils of competitive usury capitalism and the whole senseless self-righteous psychology that goes with it and the present fact of our being humbled and beat down by the rest of the world who are plain sick of us” (Letters, 99). The Second World War had entrenched a massive American military possessed of the atomic bomb. The international situation at the time was dominated by the French collapse at Dien Bien Phu in July 1954, and their quick withdrawal from colonial Indochina. The Korean War had been suspended in uneasy armistice exactly one year earlier, but a peacetime military draft continued. In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by the American government for passing secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviets – an event that Ginsberg and his friends followed warily. Southeast Asia hovered in a political vacuum. President Eisenhower visited the region, was tempted to intervene militarily – but (despite mounting internal pressure from the military hierarchy) refused, for the time being. At home, the pathological bluster of Senator McCarthy was beginning to dissipate by 1954, but the Red Scare antedated McCarthy and outlived him. Harry S. Truman, formulating the Truman Doctrine of containment that set the tone for the Cold War in 1947, had “scared hell out of the American people,”7 and fears of Soviet-style communism lingered everywhere. Every airplane overhead seemed a potential Russian bomber, as schoolchildren dove under their desks for cover.⁸ Just as threatening was the “Lavender Scare” (Johnson, Lavender Scare), which equated homosexuality with political subversion. Jim Crow still gripped the South; the Supreme Court had just ruled in Brown v. the Board of Education, but nothing had yet happened. Ginsberg was absorbing the spontaneous prose of Jack Kerouac and seeking mentorship from William Carlos Williams back home in New Jersey. Current poetry struck him as “mealy-mouthed, meaningless, abstract, tight-assed, scared, academic, uninventive, attitudinized, afraid to show feeling” (Letters 127). If Whitman’s voice struck him as “a bit oratorical,” it was nonetheless “a healthy and very ancient voice that he had to speak in” (Interviews, 110) – ancient in that it derived from the Hebrew prophets who addressed their wisdom to a collective people or, as in Ginsberg’s first line, a “generation.” Whitman offered a way to speak as an individual citizen to a diseased American society.

The three parts of “Howl” can be read against the present-past-future template of the progress poem. Part 1, which leaps like Crane’s bridge “from far Rockaway to Golden Gate,” deals with individuals in present-day New York and San Francisco, America’s western gateway to Asia. Part 3, the hymn of sympathy with Carl Solomon in Rockland, focuses on a single case and looks to an ambiguous future. Part 2, the denunciation of Moloch, looks backward to historical origins. It was sketched in October 1954, as Ginsberg in a peyote-induced hallucination conflated the Sir Francis Drake hotel building in San Francisco with the “cannibal dynamo” of Fritz Lang’s dystopian film Metropolis (1927) (Interviews, 46; Letters, 108–13). Moloch, who personifies the root causes of all social injustice, was a Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifice, a practice forbidden by Hebrew scripture. Ginsberg may have remembered him directly from Torah – “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch” (Leviticus 18:21) – or from Milton’s Paradise Lost – “besmear’d with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents tears, … / Their children’s cries unheard that passed through fire / To his grim Idol” (1.392–6). To Paul Breslin, Moloch in Puritanical fashion embodies the demonic world, balanced after the fact by the angelic world of “Footnote to Howl” (“Origins,” 25). Moloch, the “sphynx of cement and aluminum” (79), embodies the puzzling, speechless power that demands ritual sacrifice of youth, whether “boys sobbing in armies” (80) or lives corrupted by usury capitalism. Moloch represents “the mechanical feelingless inhuman world we live in and accept” (Ginsberg, Letters, 132).

Part 2 is the least satisfactory part of “Howl.” Maybe because I read it as a progress poem, I would like to see more historical awareness of the causes of social malaise. Certainly less exclamation. Moloch is too diffuse an allegory. As James Breslin asks, “what, after all the cathartic frenzy, is Moloch supposed to represent?” (“Origins,” 27). He is as diffuse an abstraction as the deadly sin of Avarice, or “late capitalism.” He is not developed sufficiently even to allegorize the descent of democracy into oligarchy prophesied in Plato’s Republic. Ginsberg’s 1986 notes identify him not only as the god of Canaanite myth but also as Blake’s Urizen – an altogether different mythology – throwing in Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” after the fact (Howl, 139). But McLuhan’s phrase, introduced in Understanding Media (1964), looks forward to a world dominated by electronics – radio, TV, film, even computer, while “Howl” looks wholly backward to a mechanized world – “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!” (83).9 Ginsberg is still fixated on the same industrial mechanisms, the dark Satanic mills that had enthralled Crane and Whitman and infuriated Tate, just as they had affected his own socialist father Louis Ginsberg, who both admired and denounced them in his own “Ode to Machines.”

Part 1 is the great achievement of “Howl.” It is sometimes printed by itself, though its meaning is grossly altered thereby. Interest in “Howl” would be less now were it not for the vitality and experiential density of its language – a quality often denied by nay-sayers and rarely demonstrated by enthusiasts, and a quality that Ginsberg never, I think, subsequently matched. Marjorie Perloff is among the few who have managed to “shift the discourse from the biographical-cultural preoccupation, which continues to dominate most studies of Ginsberg’s work, to a close look at the actual texture of ‘Howl’” (“Lost Battalion,” 32). She finds a poem inhabited by “mythic, rather than everyday” creatures, expressed through “a consistent use of tropes of excess – catachresis, oxymoron, transferred epithet – as well as rhetorical figures of incongruity” (33). In other words, “Howl” is written not carelessly but in an achieved poetic rhetoric of its own. Each of its tropes enfolds a narrative of social critique that must be unpacked. The celebrated “hydrogen jukebox” is an elliptical metaphor with a streak of synaesthesia that fixes the pop music fortissimo of the young as a retaliation against anxieties about the Bomb, with a look askance at mechanical means of reproduction. Neal Cassady, who hyperbolically “sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset,” is the superhero of sexual freedom in a world where even straight sex is unmentionable or scandalous. Throwing “potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism” is an enacted parable exposing the hypocrisy of academe, an experiential act of defiance reduced to a bit of processed information. There is subtle allusion: the reference to the “El” of urban transit in line 5 is also a Hebrew name for God. There is witty play with the vernacular: the “heavenly connection” is both theophany and illegal drug deal. The pathos of the multiple narratives is mingled with a rich vein of humour. Ginsberg has, as well, a fine natural ear – he grew up not only with his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia but his father’s household recitations of Milton (Miles, Ginsberg, xx). Ginsberg confessed to a juvenile thrill in Poe’s “The Bells” (Interviews, 245) and being “all hung up on cats like Wyatt, Surrey and Donne” (Kramer, Ginsberg, 110). Although his own endless talk about “breath” is a bore, useless as prosody, it works in “Howl” only because his long lines hyperventilate; exceeding the physical human breath; mimetic of the hyper-mania of the work itself; they burst the bonds even of the Whitmanic free-verse line.

The treatment of drugs in “Howl” is also double-edged. We read about “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo,” but these same hipsters are “poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed … smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats” (3–4). While some may have “studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah,” most were less ambitious. There is relatively little in the poem about opening the doors of perception, compared with the grim “fell out of the subway window” (William Cannestra) or “disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico” (Malcolm Lowry). His own experimenting with drugs seems to have begun as a dutiful effort of expanding consciousness attempting to replicate his Blake hallucination, or attempting to break down his own identity and seek “a more direct contact with primate sensation, nature” (Miles, Ginsberg, 325). This was his ambition when writing “Howl.” By 1963, after trying heroin, mescaline, peyote, LSD, psilosybin, and ayahuasca, “he encountered an inhuman serpent monster, a vision of death, and it got so that if he took drugs he would start vomiting with anxiety” (325). He came to the conclusion that he had “misunderstood Blake, and that Blake’s ‘Human form divine’ meant living completely living in the human form” (326). Ginsberg, his renunciation of drugs recorded in “The Change,” seems to have escaped more serious addiction, but he experienced the feelings of liberty and elation reported by many addicts in early recovery.

Madness in the poem, too, is sometimes given a simple positive construction. Ginsberg seems to be foretelling the theories of R.D. Laing, the anti-psychiatrist whose Politics of Experience (1967) argues that mental illness is an individual’s method of coping with a society gone bonkers.10 But the thread was most likely picked up from Antonin Artaud via Carl Solomon. Artaud held that “every lunatic … is a person of superior lucidity whose insights society thinks disturbing to it,” yet all his “rebellion against rebellion” leads him only to “one of the many large nuthouses” being built everywhere (Howl: Original Facsimile, 118). Ginsberg knew the terrors of actual insanity close at hand – he records them unforgettably in “Kaddish” – and he never denied its biological reality or the efficacy of medications. Justin Quinn sees this as the fundamental issue in Ginsberg’s work, relating it to the underlying antinomian strain in American experience from Puritan times: Naomi’s madness, he argues, forces Ginsberg to confront the question of “how to maintain his own ‘mystical vision’ when she seems [to] present a grotesque mirror-image of it.” “Kaddish,” he writes, “acknowledges the challenge to an aesthetic like his own that is fundamental in its social critique. No other Beat writer acknowledged and explored this difficulty so profoundly” (American Errancy, 81–2). Ginsberg, having signed the papers for Naomi’s lobotomy, never lost his sense of guilt. Madness in the poem may reflect a “neurotic culture” (Letters, 12), but it does not cease to be madness. As Bercovitch says of Melville, witnessing the “cultural schizophrenia” that he saw all round him, he could neither believe in America nor rest content in his disbelief (Jeremiad, 191). As Ginsberg wrote to Richard Eberhart, the poem says in effect “I am still your amigo tho you are in trouble and think yourself in a void” (Howl: Original Facsimile, 152; Ginsberg, Letters, 132).

My emphasis on the elements of gay self-hatred, the negative effects of drugs, and the hellish insanity in “Howl” risks making Ginsberg sound like a petit bourgeois moralist. Indeed there is that streak in him. But, as James Breslin insists, “Howl” is not the work of an angry young man. Ginsberg was nearly thirty when he wrote the poem: he did not float into San Francisco “on a magic carpet, dressed in long robes, with flowing hair, hand cymbals and a ‘San Francisco Poetry Renaissance’ banner,” but in a business suit looking for a job in – of all things – market research (“Origins,” 85). He saw himself as “a fair-haired boy in academic Columbia” (Letters, 131). The difference is that both Ginsberg and the Ginsberg persona have full personal knowledge of the mental hells he describes – madness, bad trips, the sexual abjection, all the self-destructive behaviours – and he does not judge them or condemn them. The individuals who populate his poem, having given up the maniacal appetite for “the heterosexual dollar,” feel themselves as rejects and failures, and he demands to know why. They seek ecstasies that find “no social form organization frame of reference or rapport or validation from the outside” (Letters, 131), ecstasies sexual or spiritual or both, and he demands to know why not.

More than anything else, “Howl” is a protest against the tyranny of the majority, a besetting sin of democratic governance. Ginsberg’s poem sees through the paradox of American liberty, the pressure of majority rule, and understands that the conforming majority must suffer the lunatic philosophies of both tyranny and anarchy. Ginsberg is typically seen as the leftist critic of McCarthyist Cold War America, but he was also driven out of communist Cuba and Czechoslovakia as a dangerous undesirable. The teaching of “Howl” is the insight of Blake, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” which was put into sociological theory by Emile Durkheim: laws, in order to be known, must be broken. Thus crime is necessary. Social deviance is the mother of innovation. “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” as Emily Dickinson put it; but she added a warning: “’Tis the Majority / In this, as all, prevail.” In a democratic system, the tyranny of the majority is the greatest danger: “Assent – and you are sane – / Demur – you’re straightway dangerous – / And handled with a Chain.” The chain as a way of dealing with mental aberration was no literary figure but a literal possibility for Dickinson and Ginsberg both. On the other hand, the grotesque comedy of “Howl” is paradoxically a creator of community. Laughter is an affirmation of the normative and an acknowledgment of the transgressive. The subculture of “Howl,” the bard himself included, is obliged to see its own absurdity.

I was surprised to read Ginsberg’s reply to Kenneth Koch, who asked him about the ideal life for a poet: “Retiring from the world,” he said, “living in a mountain hut, practicing certain special meditation exercises half the day, and composing epics as the sun sets” (Diggory, “Urban Pastoral,” 103). The gregarious, charismatic Ginsberg seems as unlikely to be a hermit as a saint, but one way of coping with a crazy world is to withdraw from it. Somewhere in the background of all the efforts to redefine the individual outside the narrow social role prescribed for it lies the inner serenity of mens sana in corpore sano. That is the meaning of Rockland in Part 3 of “Howl.” The asylum is just that, a safe retreat, and the poet’s repeated “I’m with you in Rockland” is, at least in part, a promise of temporary security: “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time” (72). One may think of the mental institution as a hostile place where hopeless cases are permanently warehoused, and psychiatric treatment is an instrument of institutional sadism. This is the cliché of anti-psychiatry that Mark Doty assumes when he writes of “the ferocious ‘normalizing’ force of the mental hospital … with its policing of consciousness, its brutal intervention into unacceptable states of mind” (“Human Seraphim,” 16). But one may also think of Rockland as a mental retreat – “like a hotel,” “a very convenient monastery” (Ginsberg, Interviews, 64–5) – where “it’s safer in hospital than outside” (Howl: Original Facsimile, 132). Withdrawal is a sort of Thoreauvian idyll where the individual self is healed and strengthened.11

Ginsberg the hermit must, however, like the compassionate Buddha, return. Ginsberg’s last major poem is his apocalyptic “Plutonian Ode” (1978). It signals its importance by the generic designation “ode,” which he had not used since the juvenile poems of Empty Mirror (1947–52). In 1975, Ginsberg together with poet W.S. Merwin had toured the Rockwell Corporation near Boulder, Colorado, maker of nuclear triggers for hydrogen bombs. In June 1978 he wrote his poem after “one of his typical all-night writing marathon[s],” and then, next day, he and Peter Orlovsky and others (including journalist Daniel Ellsberg) were arrested “as they sat meditating on the railroad tracks, blocking the passage of a trainload of nuclear waste” (Miles, Ginsberg, 425; Ginsberg, Letters, 531–2). The poem is unapologetically didactic, printed in the Collected Poems with lines numbered, twenty-two footnotes, and a photograph of the demonstrators. It is cast like “Howl” in three sections: present, past, and future. It mixes factual information with a range of mythologies, commonplace and esoteric, its language freighted with allusion but lacking the figurative density of “Howl.” The rhetoric of Part 1 is first person in a kind of exorcism – “I manifest your Baptismal Word” – and eventually assumes the mode of curse:

Destroyer of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous Generals!

Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars!

Judgment of judgments. Divine Wind over vengeful nations.

Molester of Presidents. Death-Scandal of Capital politics! Ah

civilizations stupidly industrious!

Canker-Hex on multitudes learned or illiterate!

The poem identifies “Doctor Seaborg” – Glenn T. Seaborg (1912–99) – as its principal villain, the Nobel-laureate scientist responsible for the synthesis and investigation of many transuranian elements, including plutonium. We are given terrifying statistics: “Ten pounds of Plutonium scattered throughout the earth is calculated sufficient to kill 4 billion people.” “300 tons of Plutonium, estimate circa 1978 of the amount produced for American bombs.” (I have not attempted to verify Ginsberg’s numbers.) We are given specifics of the military-industrial complex: plutonium plants “in Pantex, Texas, and Burlington, Iowa, managed by Mason & Hanger-Silex Mason Co., Inc.” On the mythic level, Ginsberg draws on the chthonic resonances of “plutonium” as the name of the element: there are references not only to Lord of Hades and Persephone but to Eleusis, the Furies, Nemesis, and “black sheep throats cut” (Odyssey 11 via Pound’s Canto 1). These are intermingled with astrological signs of the zodiac – “the Bull,” “Twins.” There are Judaeo-Christian references to “Baptismal Word” and Ecclesiastes (“Is there a new thing under the Sun?” “I chant your absolute Vanity”). Sophia, in Proverbs 8 said to be the first of Yahweh’s creations, provides a link between Jewish scripture and the gnostic and esoteric traditions that interested Ginsberg. The Great Year in line 11 goes back to his undergraduate study of Yeats, which Gregory Corso pointed out is related to the half-life of plutonium. Line 16, “Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an Abyss of Light” refers, we are told, to “archons of successive aeons born of Sophia’s thought, according to Ophitic and Barbelo-Gnostic myths” (suggesting that he had been studying Hans Jonas and perhaps the Nag Hamadi revelations). Such allusiveness, however mixed and ill-digested, lends gravity, even an air of Miltonic learning, to Ginsberg’s language – though oddly there is no reference to Faust or the Dantean Ulysses, damned for violating the allowable limits of human knowledge.

Part 2 of the poem turns to third person, as “the Bard surveys Plutonian history from midnight lit with Mercury Vapor streetlamps.” Part 3 turns to the future in second-person apostrophe, “O Poets and Orators to come, you father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress and American people.” The grave language of the “Plutonian Ode” lacks the excitement of Part 1 of “Howl,” but the gravity it retains is the wisdom of a revered elder statesman, now in 1978 a figure of celebrity. Philip Glass, a composer who, like Ginsberg, has roots in both pop culture and the avant garde, provided “Plutonian Ode” with symphonic music in 2002.

Ginsberg, probably America’s most widely read poet during his lifetime, had attained the status of national hero and patriot – a status often given poets in other languages but so very rarely to writers in English. Ginsberg had become a true American populist poet, in the rather ill-sorted line that includes Sigourney, Longfellow, Frost, and the poet he most resembles technically, Sandburg, and he continued to deploy his celebrity in support of the national ethos as he understood it. He was “representative” in the paradoxical sense that, as Paul Breslin tells us, he participated to some degree in nearly all the advanced literary movements of his day, yet belonged to none of them entirely (“Origins,” 22). He was “radical” in the sense described by Bercovitch: “to be American for our classic writers was by definition to be radical – to turn against the past, to defy the status quo and become an agent of change” (Jeremiad, 203). Ginsberg’s radical, antinomian, laissez-faire individualism retained its populist appeal throughout his career because it derives from the centre, not from the margins, of American tradition.

Looking back, I no longer read “Howl” in the City Lights edition, slim enough to slip into one’s back pocket. Young readers are now more likely to encounter it in a textbook. And, in his bid to be regarded as a major poet, Ginsberg has left us with a mammoth Collected Poems, organized chronologically, complete with scholarly apparatus – indices of titles and first lines, bibliographic information, footnotes, and fully reprinted introductions to individual volumes. “Howl” and its “Footnote” fill only nine of its more than seven hundred pages. If that is not enough, Ginsberg saw through press an oversize coffee-table book presenting the genetic typescripts of his major poem, multiple revisions (so much for spontaneity!), detailed annotations, illustrations, sources, an account of the obscenity proceedings – all carefully packaged in the identical format of the published manuscript of T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” that had appeared just twelve years earlier. The volume also supplies Carl Solomon’s own wistful reflections on the unwanted fame thrust upon him by Ginsberg’s appropriation of his name and his private experience. Solomon corrects factual “errors” in the poem. Neither he nor the poet was ever in Rockland (143); they met as patients in the New York Psychiatric Institute. He did not throw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism; they were lecturing on Mallarmé (131). We are now obliged to see “Howl” by hindsight, in the hands of the poet clothed in a business suit, no longer naked, and mocked for it mercilessly by Time Magazine (Henry, “New York,” 10–11). This is Ginsberg the successful careerist, the celebrity, famous for being famous more than for being read, tireless in his public appearances, clean living (more or less) since his renunciation of drugs, personally rearranging his own books to advantage in bookstores, and giving his brother inside tips on investment in the art market. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes.”

Ginsberg’s achievement, however, in these two major poems, is to force American readers to face an unacceptable outcome for their historical destiny. Since the beginning, as we have seen repeatedly, Americans have placed their faith, both religious and political, in progress. Americans have no imaginative template for regress. It cannot happen. In “Howl” and “Plutonian Ode,” Ginsberg diagnoses two versions of the terminal illness of America, one prolonged and lingering, the other quick, both emerging from deep within the vital organism of the nation.

From the beginning of this project, I planned to end with Ginsberg, a fitting counter-blast to all that early patriotic optimism in Freneau and Whitman. But life goes on. The ode continued to be largely ignored by mainstream poets but popular with bardic outsiders like Michael McClure and John Weiners. In 1960, Frank O’Hara published his life-affirming volume of Odes as a fine art book, with illustrations by Mike Goldberg. Paul Carroll’s Odes appeared in 1969. I might have included Frank McGrath’s fine Korean War poem, “Ode for the American Dead in Asia” (1972), or James Wright’s “Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion in Minnesota, 1862” (1971), or Adrienne Rich’s consummate achievement in the greater romantic lyric, “Transcendental Etude” (1978). American poets have taken up political themes more readily in recent years than they did during the great debate between Levertov and Duncan – whose “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (1960) is another postwar political ode that returns us straight to the origins of the genre. The American poet is probably destined forever to speak more easily as a unique self than as a citizen. But poetry must be free to encompass both voices if it hopes to embrace the extensive totality of human experience.