A Supermarket in California
A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg 1955
Written in 1955, “A Supermarket in California” appeared the next year in Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg’s controversial and groundbreaking book of verse that is often credited with initiating the Beat movement. “Beat” is a term coined by writer Jack Kerouac to mean both “beat down” and “beatitude.” It was meant to describe the dissatisfaction and spiritual exhaustion of a generation that came of age during the 1940s and 1950s.
A whimsical, almost comic poem, “A Supermarket in California” addresses, in a surrealistic fashion, Ginsberg’s own relation to Walt Whitman, the nineteenth-century, American poet considered by many to be the father of modern poetry and one of Ginsberg’s literary idols. As in most of Ginsberg’s poems, the speaker is Ginsberg himself (rather than a poetic persona), and he uses the supermarket as a metaphoric setting for dreaming about the possibilities that America offers and lamenting the country it has instead become.
One of Ginsberg’s most frequently anthologized shorter poems, “A Supermarket in California” not only acknowledges Ginsberg’s debt to Whitman’s vision of America as a place of possibility and abundance, but also allows Ginsberg to place himself (more explicitly) in a tradition of gay writers. When Ginsberg writes “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys,” he alludes to the homoerotic desire so prevalent in Whitman’s own work. This possibility of being openly gay in America is one of the
many opportunities that Whitman’s poetry enabled for Ginsberg.
The primary theme of the poem, however, is the moral choice with which America is faced. Will it, as Ginsberg suggests in this and other poems, continue to be a place of acquisitiveness, empty material values, and alienated individuals? Or will America recognize its inherent spirituality and embrace the possibilities for living in a real human community? Ginsberg asks, “Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?” Ginsberg is troubled and looking to Whitman for answers at the end of this poem.
Author Biography
A cultural icon of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a leading Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, the son of poet and high school teacher Louis Ginsberg and Russian immigrant Naomi Ginsberg. After being expelled from Columbia University in 1946, Ginsberg—like so many of his Beat contemporaries such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, etc.—tried his hand at a number of jobs, including dishwasher, welder, literary agent, night porter, and copy boy. He returned to Columbia in 1948, eventually graduating with a bachelor of arts degree. It was during this second tenure at Columbia that Ginsberg experienced the first of a series of mystic visions of eighteenth-century poet William Blake; these visions led to a reevaluation of his own relationship to reality, and he participated in psychoanalysis and various forms of therapy while spending eight months in 1949 at Rockland (New York) State Hospital. This time was instrumental in the development of Ginsberg’s poetic voice, which was heavily influenced by Blake and Walt Whitman and attempted to break down the barriers between poetry and religion, religion and being.
In 1954 Ginsberg moved to San Francisco, where he published Howl and Other Poems (1956) with City Lights Books. Now considered the spark that ignited the San Francisco literary Renaissance, “Howl,” the second section of which was written during a peyote vision, was part lament, part polemic, and all prophetic voice. More than any other single poem from the 1950s, “Howl” describes the disaffection and disillusionment so many young people of his generation had with American values. The language and subject matter of “Howl” hit such a raw nerve with the U.S. government that litigation over it led to an obscenity trial.
The success of “Howl” made Ginsberg an international figurehead for other Beat writers, and he traveled widely giving readings and speaking out against the empty material values of the West. Following “Howl,” Ginsberg wrote a different kind of lament—“Kaddish” (1961)—that detailed the tortured (but loving) relationship he had with his mother, Naomi, herself a victim of mental illness and emotional torment. Poet Robert Lowell referred to this poem as Ginsberg’s “terrible masterpiece.”
Ginsberg solidified his status as a counterculture hero of the West during the 1960s in his next books Reality Sandwiches (1963) and Planet News (1969), which continued to question popular conceptions of reality. The Fall of America, which registers a sustained protest against the Vietnam War in particular and the spiritual emptiness of the West in general, received the National Book Award for 1972. Other books include Collected Poems: 1947-1980, the annotated Howl, White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985, and Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992. Rhino records issued his compact disc set Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949-1993.Ginsberg was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the Western world’s first accredited Buddhist college.
Allen Ginsberg died on April 5th, 1997.
[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]
Poem Summary
Lines 1-3
The first stanza introduces us to a speaker experiencing a vision of sorts. Although in most cases it is not fair to conflate the identity of the speaker of a poem with the poet, because of Ginsberg’s own autobiographical approach toward poetry we can assume that the speaker is Ginsberg himself. Right away we know that he is in a state of exhaustion and not seeing the world in a conventional way, as he describes himself as having a headache and being in a “hungry fatigue.” As well as being a possibly literal description of his feeling, these words also suggest that Ginsberg is world weary—that he suffers from a spiritual, as much as a physical exhaustion. While searching for something that will set him right, he dreams of Walt Whitman as a source of inspiration. Whitman is a literary and spiritual hero to Ginsberg and, in many ways, Ginsberg emulates Whitman’s style and subject matter in his own poems.
Ginsberg is being ironic when he writes that he is “shopping for images” in a “neon fruit supermarket.” One does not normally think about “buying” images, especially not in a supermarket. But by looking for his poetic inspiration in a commercial setting, Ginsberg underscores one of the themes of his poem: the reduction of every thing and thought in America to something that can be bought and sold. By saying that he is dreaming of Whitman’s “enumerations,” Ginsberg means the way in which Whitman in his own verse catalogued or counted (e.g., “enumerated”) what he saw and thought. Ginsberg does this himself in the last sentence when he lists what he sees in the supermarket. The last image, that of Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca, is surprising but significant when we understand that Lorca, like Ginsberg, was a heavily persecuted gay writer (poet and playwright). Lorca, also an admirer of Whitman (one of his wellknown poems is called “Ode to Walt Whitman”), was executed by anti-republican rebels in Granada in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
Lines 4-7
The speaker addresses Whitman directly here, but Ginsberg’s vision of Whitman is not a romantic one, but rather a vision of a sad, old man who is poking around the meats looking for a bargain. This is how Ginsberg imagines Whitman might be had he lived in modern America. He calls him a “lonely old grubber,” but means it as a term of affection rather than an insult. Ginsberg underscores his own sexual desires and his knowledge of Whitman’s homoerotic impulses when he says that he sees him “eyeing the grocery boys.” In actuality, Whitman was anything but a lecherous old man. Even his sexuality remains a mystery, though many critics theorize he had same-sex love affairs. The
Media Adaptations
- Rhino Records released a boxed set of four compact discs of Ginsberg’s poems and songs titled Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs 1949-1993.
- In 1993 Elektra Nonesuch released a libretto written by Allen Ginsberg (with music by Phillip Glass) called “Hydrogen Jukebox.”
- In 1993 Fantasy Records released Howls, Raps & Roars: Recordings from the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, which includes Ginsberg reading Howl & Other Poems.
- Jerry Aronson directed and produced the documentary The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg in 1993 for the American Masters Series of the Public Broadcasting System. This documentary is available at many libraries, video stores, and at amazon.com.
- The Naropa Institute Tape Archive in Boulder, Colorado, has many tapes of Ginsberg both reading and playing music from 1974 to 1988.
kinds of questions that Whitman asks of the meat and boys suggest how Ginsberg himself sees Whitman: as someone who is ravenous of all kinds of knowledge, both practical and inspirational. In following Whitman, Ginsberg imagines that he himself is being followed by store detectives. This line and the one that follows speak to the influence that Whitman has had on Ginsberg and to the controversial reputation of both poets. The store detective can be seen as the controlling force of conventional morality, a force that poets have struggled against in all cultures. That both poets taste freely of the store’s delicacies without having to pay highlights Ginsberg’s own fantasy that he can be different (both poetically and socially) and not have to pay the consequences.
Lines 8-12
The speaker opens the last stanza by asking Whitman where they are going, because “the doors close in an hour.” Ginsberg does not mean that the doors literally close in an hour, but that America has very little time left to change itself and become an open, tolerant society that has a spiritual rather than a materialistic orientation to the world. Whitman’s beard metaphorically functions as a moral compass, suggesting that America will or will not heed the imperative to change. The only line in parenthesis in the entire poem clues us in to the genesis of Ginsberg’s vision: he has been reading Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass. Whitman worked on Leaves of Grass almost his entire life, first publishing it in 1855, then putting out revised and expanded versions for the next thirty years. The poems in Leaves of Grass describe America and the diversity of individuals who make up the idea of America. Whitman’s long, sprawling lines lament, celebrate, and explore the ways in which human beings are both solitary creatures and a part of something larger (hence the title), and the work is almost epic in scope. Ginsberg feels “absurd” about his supermarket fantasy because he feels he is trivializing Whitman’s work.
Ginsberg is nostalgic about an America that has passed, no doubt the America described by Whitman himself in Leaves of Grass. The 1950s America that Ginsberg sees himself living in is a conformist one, where people work long hours at unfulfilling jobs to acquire their houses, cars, and families. This is summed up by the image “blue automobiles in driveways.” Ginsberg ends his poem by invoking the spirit of Whitman and asking him what America was like when he died. He does this metaphorically, however, by placing Whitman literally at the gates of hell. Charon is the elderly boatman in Greek mythology who ferried the souls of the recently dead cross the river Lethe to the underworld. Since Lethe is the river of forgetting, Ginsberg seems to be asking if Whitman’s America, the America of individuality and spirituality, has itself been forgotten. The last image of the poem—Whitman standing on the banks of the river watching the boat disappear—underscores Ginsberg’s elegiac tone throughout the poem and questions as it complicates the bonds between the past and the present.
Themes
American Dream
Historically America has held the promise of freedom—freedom not only to worship one’s own God, but freedom also to pursue material wealth. “A Supermarket in California” asks the question what happens when the God that one worships is material wealth itself? The very setting of the poem emphasizes this dilemma. Supermarkets are places of abundance and choice and can be seen as metaphor for American-style capitalism. A “neon fruit supermarket” takes that metaphor over the top, as fruit suggests fecundity and neon the gaudy advertisement of it. Placing the supermarket in California, the largest of the United States and historically thought of as “a promised land” (think of the Gold Rush of 1849), further underscores the idea of material acquisition. The first stanza of the poem exaggerates the commodification of all things in America. Ginsberg’s celebratory description suggests nothing so much as a place where people worship this abundance, where what they buy becomes interchangeable with who they are: “Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!” Ginsberg writes.
The second stanza places Walt Whitman, the nineteenth-century, American poet who celebrated America’s spiritual unity, in modern America—in that same supermarket—to explore what has become of the American Dream in the twentieth century. What results is an image of a lecherous “old grubber” who cannot keep his hands off the merchandise. Ginsberg sees himself and Whitman as outlaws of sorts as they sample the market’s delicacies but never pay for them. Such transgressions have their price, however, as Ginsberg imagines himself being followed by the store detective. This demonstrates how the laws of the market (buying and paying for food) become the laws of our conscience and determine not only how we think about the world outside of us, but how we think about ourselves as well.
Ginsberg shows nostalgia for a better, more spiritually cohesive America in the last stanza when he asks Whitman where the country is headed (“Which way does your beard point tonight?”). Whitman’s America celebrated not so much the riches that made the United States, as the workers and common man and woman who made the riches possible. The last sentence of the poem suggests that the America that Whitman celebrated in Leaves of Grass—the America where the labor that went into products was as valuable as the products themselves, the America where each person was singularly creative and different—is a thing of the past.
Artists and Society
“A Supermarket in California” investigates the historical relationship that poets have had to society,
Topics for Further Study
- For Ginsberg, the supermarket symbolized both the freedom of choice and the spiritual bankruptcy of America. Think of a place that holds conflicting feelings for you and write about the reasons you feel this way.
- Think about the relationship between your dreams and your waking life. Write a poem that explores what a dream has shown you about how you live.
- Interview a few people who are at least twenty years older than you and ask them how they felt about the future when they were your age. What are the similarities and differences between their memories about the future and your own attitude toward it?
exploring Ezra Pound’s claim that they are “the antennae of our race.” In the opening stanza, as the speaker experiences the metaphysical exhaustion so common to artists, he begins to dream of poets Walt Whitman and Frederico Garcia Lorca, both of whom were chroniclers of their age and also social outcasts. Ginsberg the speaker finds solace in imagining how other poets would respond to the crass materialism of twentieth-century America. He does this by imagining both Whitman and Lorca in a California supermarket, literally a place of material abundance. Finding comfort and community with others who share your values remains a human activity not only for poets but for all of us. By imagining that Whitman himself is with Ginsberg as he travels through the material culture of modern America, Ginsberg echoes popular assumptions about poets as spiritual guides through confusing time and places. Just as Dante relied on Virgil to show him through the maze of hell, so too does Ginsberg rely on Whitman to show him the direction that America will take. That the poem ends with a question, not a statement, suggests that Ginsberg remains unsure about whether America can live up to its potential.
Style
“A Supermarket in California” is written in an expansive, free-verse form. Free verse is an open form of writing in which the rhythmic pattern is not organized into meter—that is, into units of stressed and unstressed syllables—but rather follows more natural or organic patterns of composition. Ginsberg treats his lines as single breath units, foregrounding the fact that his verse is meant to be read aloud. In A Short History of American Poetry, Donald Barlow Stauffer observes that “This is oral poetry, and the printed page can only suggest the side range of devices Ginsberg uses in his public readings: the shouting, the whispering, the carefully timed sotto voce asides, the comic Jewish inflections, the gestures of hands, arms, and waggling beard, the pauses and crescendos, the chanting, are all devices that relate his poetry to music and dance and help to establish a new oral tradition.”
Ginsberg organizes his sentences into three stanzas of increasing length (three, then four, then five sentences). The effect of this type of organization is one of building momentum. The additive nature of the stanzas also underscores one of the points of the poem: that America has become a bankrupt society based on material acquisitiveness.
The poem is part description, part meditation, and part lament, and its associative logic is more akin to a daydream. This is also borne out by the imagery, which is surreal or dream-like. When the speaker exclaims “What peaches and penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! ... Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes,” we understand that this isn’t an empirical, objective supermarket being described, but rather a vision of a supermarket filtered through a particular (daydreaming) consciousness. It is the experience of the vision that the poet attempts to communicate, as much as the vision itself. Dream visions were a poetic form widely employed by medieval poets. In the dream vision, the narrator falls asleep and—in his dream—meets a guide who teaches him things about the world. The narrator then wakes up and relates the content of his dream. Ginsberg’s guide in this poem is Whitman, the “lonely old courage teacher,” whom he follows through the supermarket and then “through solitary streets.”
It is significant that although others have noticed techniques and poetic devices that Ginsberg uses, he himself has denied any conscious intention to use these techniques and devices. “Primary fact of my writing is that I don’t have any craft and I don’t know what I’m doing,” Ginsberg said in an interview. “There is absolutely no art involved, in the context of the general use of the words ‘art’ and ‘craft.’ Such craft of art as there is, is in illuminating mental formations, and trying to observe the naked activity of my own mind. Then transcribing that activity down on paper.”
Historical Context
“A Supermarket in California” was written in 1955, in the midst of postwar economic expansion in the United States. America’s move to the suburbs, which Ginsberg equated with a kind of spiritual death and diminished individuality, was literally underway. Fueled by a lack of housing for returning veterans of World War II, developers began building on the outskirts of large cities. War contractor William J. Levitt’s developments epitomized what would come to define the suburban experience. Between 1947 and 1951, Levitt converted a potato field in Levittown, Long Island, into a development of 17,000 Cape Cod houses that housed 75,000 people. Using prefabricated materials and package deals that included everything (including the kitchen sink), Levitt was able to produce a four-and-a-half room house for $8,000. Levitt eventually perfected his system so that he could put up a house every sixteen minutes. Once in the house, you needed entertainment, and by 1957 Americans owned more than forty million television sets. Advertising—then as now—dictated programming and the broadcast schedule, and Americans were inundated with messages to buy home-care products for their new homes. Where else would they buy these products than at the supermarket? The supermarket itself was a relatively new entity in 1950s America, as mom-and-pop grocery stores and other small food stores closed because they were unable to compete with well-capitalized chain stores. Between 1948 and 1958, nearly 100,000 independent groceries went out of business. To get to the supermarkets, Americans relied increasingly on the automobile. The “blue automobiles” that the speaker and Whitman stroll past in “A Supermarket in California” were only a few of the millions being pumped out by Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. Auto registration in the United States increased from forty million in 1950 to sixty-two million in 1960. In addition to all the consumer spending on televisions, automobiles, housing, and home appliances, Americans
Compare & Contrast
- 1948-55: Although The Kinsey Report claims that 37 percent of the men and 13 percent of the women interviewed had post-adolescent homosexual experience, the federal government considered homosexual inclination a security risk during the Cold War.
1993: The United States armed forces adopt a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward gay men and women in the military, effectively keeping homosexuality a violation of army code and forcing gay individuals to conceal their sexuality.
- 1954-55: Movies such as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause showed disillusioned youth questioning and rejecting the materialistic values of their parents.
1988: Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street detailed the relationship between a wealthy corporate takeover artist and a materialistic young stockbroker, both of whom are caught violating securities trading laws.
Today: Movies such as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet and Martin Scorcese’s Kundun demonstrate the West’s fascination with the spiritualism of the East.
- 1947: There were ten major television broadcasting stations.
1951: The first coaxial cable linked East Coast and West Coast, enabling all Americans to see the same television program at the same time.
Today: Cable television has given Americans access to literally hundreds of television channels. In addition, the internet allows almost instantaneous transmission of data over phone lines and cable worldwide.
were also buying spirituality, as they returned to churches in record numbers, partly as an attempt to establish some sense of community or belonging that they had lost as they lived further and further away from centers of social activity. But the churches were not selling salvation as much as they were exhorting people to believe in themselves. The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s best-seller, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), exemplifies the kind of “new” evangelism that postwar affluence engendered. That Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 is significant as a response to the increasing anxiety Americans had about religion and the place (or lack of it) in their lives.
The 1950s in America also witnessed a growing movement against the conformity and oppressive sameness of daily life. Many young people opted to drop out and experience the world rather than get married, take a nine-to-five job, and pollute the air with gas-guzzling automobiles on their commute to and from work. The Beat movement, of which Allen Ginsberg was an integral part, was both a response to such oppression and an enabler of further rebellion. Jack Kerouac’s hit novel On the Road, published in 1957, told the story of rebellious hipsters who lived spontaneously, crisscrossing the country while high on Benzedrine, marijuana, and alcohol and always ready for a sexual (mis)adventure. Kerouac’s prose celebrated sexual freedom and the possibility to do what you wanted when you wanted. The Beats championed the bebop jazz of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, whose improvisatory methods of composition they frequently followed in their own lives and art.
Critical Overview
Published as part of Howl and Other Poems, “A Supermarket in California” piggybacked on the notoriety and success of that volume. After already selling out the first edition (printed by Villiers in England), a portion of the second printing of Howl was stopped by United States Custom officials at San Francisco, who impounded it, claiming that the writing was obscene. After a series of hearings during which the book’s social relevance was debated, charges were dropped and the book was released. “Howl” comprises the bulk of the book, and “A Supermarket in California” is one of the shorter “other” poems in the volume, which also includes “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound”; “Sunflower Sutra”; and “America.” In Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Merrill asserts that “A Supermarket in California” mirrors Ginsberg’s own bewilderment with America, as he attempts to balance his own hope for and despair about the country. It is difficult, if not impossible, for the poet not to be a shopper. “Here is poet as consumer filling his shopping cart for the ingredients of his art among ‘Aisles full of husbands!’” Merrill writes.
In a mixed review written in 1957 and appearing in Sewanee Review, poet and critic James Dickey argues that Ginsberg lacks a sense of craft in “Howl,” claiming that just about anybody can be a poet. “In each case the needed equipment is very simple,” Dickey says, “a life, with its memories, frustrations, secret wishes ... an ability to write elementary prose and to supply it with rather more exclamation points than might normally be called for.” Dickey goes on to question Ginsberg’s approach toward poetry itself. “Confession is not enough,” he remarks, “and neither is the assumption that the truth of one’s experience will emerge if only one can keep talking long enough in a whipped-up state of excitement. It takes more than this to make poetry. It just does.”
In his The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century, Michael Davidson focuses on the subtext of “A Supermarket in California,” charging that Whitman functions as an alter ego for Ginsberg “who himself is ‘self-conscious’ and ‘shopping for images.’” Viewing the poem as a statement on Ginsberg’s own sexual alienation, Davidson writes that Ginsberg’s evocation of Whitman “emphasizes that this loneliness is also the historical loneliness of the homosexual who is denied the opportunity to participate in the bounty of ‘normal’ American life.”
A good part of the poem’s popularity can be traced to its brevity and its themes. Unlike “Howl,” “A Supermarket in California” can be printed on one page, and its royalties are considerably less than those of the longer work. “A Supermarket in California” also touches on many of the ideas that appear in Ginsberg’s longer poems: the spiritual desolation of America; homoeroticism; the influence of the past (specifically Walt Whitman’s influence); and the isolation of the modern individual. These factors, along with the attention garnered from Ginsberg’s recent death, continue to make the poem attractive to anthologists.
Criticism
Tyrus Miller
Tyrus Miller is an assistant professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University, where he teaches twentieth-century literature and visual arts. In the following essay, Miller compares Ginsberg’s vision of America as presented in “A Supermarket in California with that of Whitman’s in poems such as “Song of Myself.”
Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” written in Berkeley, California, in 1955, mourns the recent fate of the great poetic vision Walt Whitman had pronounced one hundred years earlier in “Song of Myself.” Whitman had put himself poetically at the center of the cosmos, as if he were a radiant node in which the smallest and humblest thing found equal place with the grandest stars the night sky. Employing a long, flexible, unrhymed line ultimately derived from the King James Bible, Whitman’s poems often enumerate objects, people, places, and names in great lists. Along with his innovations in poetic form, he also included a much-expanded range of subject matter, some of which was thought poetically inappropriate at the time, such as matters of sex and the body, scenes of physical injury and death, and images of common labor and slavery. Whitman saw the American democracy of the mid-nineteenth century as the political corollary of his poetry. American poetry and American politics were to be open, democratic, tolerant, accepting, ever-questioning, and grand in scale. Whitman presented himself as communicating with every point in this cosmos, passing outward poetically through a series of widening concentric rings: the body, the city, the American nation, the world, and the universe. At the beginning of “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg introduces himself as pondering this magnificent democratic vista of poetry and later as holding a volume of Whitman’s poetry. Constantly alluding to various aspects of Whitman’s poetry and life, Ginsberg ironically and humorously measures himself against Whitman’s grandiose poetic self-depiction and compares Whitman’s ideal view of America with what it had actually become in the era of anti-Communist witch-hunts, preprocessed food, television advertising, and nuclear bombs.
Coming a hundred years after Whitman, Ginsberg is inspired by the bard’s vision of a vigorously democratic America sung by a new, public poetry. But he is far less confident that this vision can actually be fulfilled, either by the American consumer society of the mid-twentieth century or by the young poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg signals his worries in a number of ways. Most important, he employs the physical setting of his poem in a symbolically significant way. Whereas Whitman’s best-known poetry takes place amidst the populous bustle of Manhattan, along the open road, or at the ocean side, Ginsberg’s setting is far more humble, even suburban: the large-chain grocery store. Ginsberg has taken Whitman’s spacious poetry of the outdoors and thrust it back indoors. What was once open space is now bounded and carefully policed. No longer can Ginsberg innocently “loiter “and “loaf” (two verbs Whitman uses to describe how he witnesses the American scene) in the claustrophobic space of the supermarket. Its stacks of cans and its aisles jammed with carts and shopping families are a poor substitute for the bustle of the city and the highways that Whitman celebrated, and there are suspicious employees watching the dreamy, aimless poet at every step to make sure he is not shoplifting. If in his poetic dream of comradeship with Whitman, Ginsberg can stride “down the open corridors” of the supermarket, tasting the fruit and frozen food and not paying, this only serves to remind his reader how much life in the America of the 1950s was hemmed in by disapproving “detectives” and “cashiers”—by the power of the law and the almighty dollar.
Ginsberg also shifts from Whitman’s typical images of work and production to images of spending money and consuming. In section 12 of “Song of Myself,” for example, Whitman presents a figure who might still be seen, in a different incarnation, in Ginsberg’s supermarket: “The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market, / I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.” The poet catches the working boy at a pause in his labor and listens to him bantering with his fellow workers. In Ginsberg’s poem, in contrast, Whitman is presented as the lonely gay cruiser, surrounded mostly by products for sale and consumption rather than the activity of producing: “I saw you, Walt Whitman,
What Do I Read Next?
- On April 21, 1967, Harvey Cox wrote “An Open Letter to Allen Ginsberg” in the Catholic weekly Commonweal, answering Ginsberg’s question about what religion is doing to make itself relevant today.
- Tom Clarke’s Spring, 1966 Paris Review interview of Ginsberg delves into Ginsberg’s views on poetic technique and, especially, how his own technique embodies spirituality and what Ginsberg calls “emotional nakedness.”
- The Fall of America, which Ginsberg dedicated to Walt Whitman and for which Ginsberg won the National Book Award in 1972, is a register of Ginsberg’s political and personal consciousness from 1965-1971. These poems provide an unfiltered description of any and everything that passed before Ginsberg’s eyes and through his mind during these years.
- In The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960, Mary Jezer provides a detailed social history of America, including the development of suburban culture. The study was published in 1982.
- The emergence of gay communities is detailed in John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, published in 1983.
childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. / I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?” The marketplace labor of the butcher-boy in Whitman’s earlier poem is nowhere to be seen in the modern supermarket, only the precut and packaged meat glowing unnaturally under the fluorescent lights. The bananas, from somewhere in Latin America, similarly conceal the labor of cultivating and picking them beneath an abstract price tag. Even the “Angel,” as an image
“Ginsberg finds himself a social splinter whose only true comrades are ghosts. He finds only solitary roles left to fill: the late-night shopper, ... the American poet without an audience.”
of pure spirit without body, is a kind of false label put on a much earthier desire of the body. Each question Whitman poses here implies a form of absence and disembodied existence, ironically revealing the artificially lit “neon fruit supermarket” to be the exact opposite of that intensely present “body electric” praised in Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric.” Moreover, by implanting sly sexual puns in his imagery, Ginsberg’s poem suggests that even the boys whom Whitman once poetically presented at work have become for him one more consumable item among the “meat” and “fruit.” Playfully inviting obvious but silly Freudian interpretations of his poem, Ginsberg even has old queer Whitman inquire about the price of bananas!
This shift from production to consumption is also reflected in the way Ginsberg presents himself in the poem. He encounters the shade of Whitman in a state of physical and poetic vacancy: hungry and tired, he shops for food; poetically uninspired, he goes “shopping for images.” Just as Whitman set himself among the working men of the marketplace to collect experience for his poetry, so too does Ginsberg go to the market for literary materials. Yet unlike Whitman’s individuals, among these strangely glowing vegetables and pork chops there are only two individualized figures, and they both are the ghosts of dead gay poets: the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, killed by fascists during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, and Walt Whitman. Whereas Lorca had been able to identify himself and his poetry with the aspirations of the whole Spanish people for freedom, and Whitman had been able to reflect back to his American readers an idealized image of their democratic life, Ginsberg finds himself a social splinter whose only true comrades are ghosts. He finds only solitary roles left to fill: the late-night shopper, the lonely gay male without a lover, the American poet without an audience. Moreover, even the “representative” poets Whitman and Lorca are themselves now only ghosts, and their claim to be the voice of their people rests solely on the ability of their poetry to compel conviction in later readers and writers such as Ginsberg. No longer does their status depend on what they, as poets, produce, but rather on how their work, in their absence and under the sign of their signature, will be “consumed” by the generations that follow them.
The full impact of what has been lost in the century since Whitman pronounced his “America of love” comes home in the magnificent final stanza. Situating himself in a long tradition of visionary poetry, Ginsberg makes Whitman his guide into the spaces of the dead, just as centuries earlier Dante had taken the Latin poet Virgil as his guide through hell in the Divine Comedy. By evoking the supermarket’s closing time, Ginsberg signals his awareness of his own mortality, hoping that his own poetry, guided by Whitman’s, will help him in that time in which he will no longer have need to shop for either food or images: “Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?” Even as he raises this serious question, however, he doubts whether he can justifiably use the heightened poetic rhetoric of the visionary tradition. By comparison, for example, to the descent into the underworld that is a central episode in Homer’s epic Odyssey, in Virgil’s Aeneid, and again in Dante’s Inferno, Ginsberg’s small-case “odyssey” among ghosts in the supermarket seems both selfconsciously literary (“I touch your book”) and contrived (“and feel absurd”).
These doubts, expressed parenthetically in the second line, get powerfully answered by the sheer elegiac force of the last three lines, in which Ginsberg struggles to convince himself and his readers of his right to put himself, even before death, in the visionary company of Whitman, thus anticipating his posthumous fame as the older poet’s heir. The final lines combine two effects, which work together to give the poem’s close its extraordinary resonance. Almost like a stage manager overseeing a fade-out, Ginsberg narrows the visual focus to the two poets, Whitman and Ginsberg, and concludes with their complete vanishing in blackness and smoke. At the same time, however, these final lines have a strong outward movement, as if we were watching them walk away from us until they disappeared from view altogether. The first of the three ultimate lines sets these effects side-by-side and thus allow us to see how Ginsberg, with great skill, makes them converge in the long concluding line. “Will we walk all night through solitary streets?” lends the line its outward sweep, while the sentence that follows drops the lights to a single focus: “The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.” After this fall into near-blackness, the next line picks up the forward momentum again: “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?” Then, as if imitating the movement of the boat of Charon, ferryman into the underworld, over the river Lethe’s water of forgetfulness, Ginsberg evokes four short dips of the oars and a long glide over three printed lines without a comma break up to the question mark that ends the poem: “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”
This beautiful ending does not, however, ultimately dispel the doubts raised in the poem about the ability of poetry to connect with a larger community and thus overcome isolation, loneliness, and death. For though Ginsberg movingly evokes his bond of poetic son with father Whitman and his deep appreciation of his lonely old “courage-teacher,” this personal and ghostly community of gay poets is no longer Whitman’s idealized “America of love.” In essence, Ginsberg suggests that time has revealed Whitman’s amatory America to be a myth and no longer a credible source of inspiration for a poet with ambitions to walk in Whitman’s footsteps. The poem ends on a profoundly unsettling and questioning note: What America, Ginsberg asks his great predecessor in the final line, was left to you to turn into poetic myth when the last spark of your consciousness was extinguished by death? Is there anything that remains of that past America for me, Allen Ginsberg, to preserve in your name? The answer remains open beyond the bounds of the final question mark. But Ginsberg’s conclusion on the word “Lethe,” connoting forgetfulness, suggests his pessimism: America, it seems, cannot be rendered eternal by poetry, even by the greatest poetry. It may be already that it has almost fallen into oblivion.
Source: Tyrus Miller, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.
Marisa Anne Pagnattaro
Marisa Anne Pagnattaro, J.D., Ph.D. in English, is a freelance writer and a Robert E. West Teaching Fellow in the English Department at the University of Georgia. In the following essay, Pagnattaro explores Ginsberg’s love for Walt Whitman and his sense of isolation from mainstream America in the 1950s.
Nearly fifteen years before he wrote “A Supermarket in California,” a high-school English teacher introduced Allen Ginsberg to the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Barry Miles notes in Ginsberg: A Biography that Ginsberg “has described how one afternoon she ‘read aloud verses from Whitman’s Song of Myself in so enthusiastic and joyous a voice, so confident and lifted with laughter, that I immediately understood “I wear my hat indoors as well as out ... I find no fat sweeter than that which sticks to my bones” forever.’” Whitman’s poetry did, indeed, stick to Ginsberg’s bones. Throughout his life, Whitman’s work formed an important basis for Ginsberg’s individualism and his desire to write using clear language, thereby making poetry accessible to many people.
“A Supermarket in California” is a tribute to Whitman’s legacy of writing about the world in which he lived and is an expression of Ginsberg’s sense of isolation from the mainstream values of America in the 1950s. Ginsberg’s world may have been far removed from Whitman’s, yet the two shared the kind of poetic perspective necessary to comment on their time. Indeed, the mere title of the poem evokes a place that was unknown to the nineteenth-century poet; the word “supermarket” was not even in existence until the middle of the twentieth century. By 1955, however, when Ginsberg wrote the poem in Berkeley, California, the phenomenon of a chain of large self-service stores signaled progress and abundance for many Americans. For Ginsberg, this place prompts a sense of loneliness, as well as nostalgia, for Whitman’s expansive and all-embracing vision of America.
In the first stanza, Ginsberg summons Whitman into his thoughts during a moonlit stroll to relieve the pain of self-reflection. As an artist who was at the forefront of a counterculture movement in opposition to the “Leave-it-to-Beaver” Eisenhower years, Ginsberg was an outsider on a suburban street. He had already written his controversial long poem “Howl,” which was in the process of sparking what would later come to be known as the Beat Generation Movement. Acknowledging
“As an artist who was at the forefront of a counterculture movement in opposition to the ‘Leave-it-to-Beaver’ Eisenhower years, Ginsberg was an outsider on a suburban street.”
the power of the poem in his introduction to “Howl,” poet William Carlos Williams admonished readers: “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.” In contrast, the tone of “Supermarket” is quieter and more reflective, and yet it still bears all of Ginsberg’s poetic self-consciousness.
Using the long verse line inspired by Whitman and English poet William Blake (1757-1827), Ginsberg shops “for images” in the “neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations.” Whitman is well known for the “enumerations” in his poems—lists or catalogs of people and images from the world he observed. Readers are meant to compare Whitman’s vision of plenty in America with the much more contained and less natural world that Ginsberg now observes. Ginsberg also taps into the tradition of the Modernists he admired, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who advocated concrete expression of images to capture the moments of experience. Ginsberg then confronts his readers with a smattering of images. The exuberance of the following line momentarily creates an almost frantic mood: “What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” The introduction of the Spanish poet and dramatist Garcia Lorca (1899-1936) creates a surrealistic atmosphere, pulling a sense of the subconsciousness into the present. Similar to Lorca’s work, which was characterized by the interconnectedness of dreams and reality in his characters’ lives, the entire scene takes on a fantastic quality. This is significant in that Ginsberg stood completely apart from the 1950s conventional notion of “family,” with its neat composition of a mother, father, and babies.
Ginsberg’s affinity with Whitman is evident in the next stanza in which the old poet suddenly appears as an incongruous, yet welcome, element: “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.” Like Ginsberg, Whitman was also homosexual and would have felt equally out of place in the glare of the supermarket, a wholesome bastion where families feel free to shop at night. Even his questions underscore his discordant presence: “Who killed the pork chops? ... Are you my Angel?” For Ginsberg, Whitman offers a kindred spirit, one who is unabashed by his difference in the glare of the supermarket. He offers a new perspective on the meat isle as he equates death with food and propositions a bag boy. In his imagination, Ginsberg follows Whitman and the two are trailed by “the store detective.” It is as if both are suspect; they are illicit variables marring the respectable veneer of mainstream America. Leaving behind his self-consciousness, Ginsberg brazenly strolls with Whitman in “solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.” They indulge in sensual, edible pleasures and are not held accountable to the “real world” in this fantasy.
The indulgence, however, will soon be over (“The doors close in an hour”), and the questions begin, signaling the return of Ginsberg’s uncertainty about the world. He asks: “Where are we going Walt Whitman?” The overtones are also sexual: “Which way does your beard point tonight?” Ginsberg looks for a phallic indication of what is to come. In an erotic parenthetical Ginsberg professes “(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd).” Ginsberg is on an odyssey of sorts; like Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, there is the sense that he is trying to get home. Although for Ginsberg, he cannot return to the “home” of Whitman’s America and there is no clear sense of such a place in the poem. The pair is left with the option of walking “all night through solitary streets” on what appears to be a journey with no real place of belonging in the contemporary world. He laments that “the lights will be out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.” The lively excursion into the supermarket is over, replaced by questions.
The final stanza begins with another somber question, which again underscores Ginsberg’s sense of isolation from mainstream America: “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?” Whitman was a great believer in Thomas Jefferson’s democratic ideals, which were continued at the beginning of the nineteenth century during Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The America that Ginsberg bemoans lacks the spiritual fellowship once envisioned by Whitman. In its place is a world of personal identification through consumerism and conformity, of “blue automobiles in driveways.” This complacent suburban ideal has little to offer a radical and highly individualistic thinker such as Ginsberg.
The last question and line of the poem, which directly addresses Whitman as a wise and aged figure, requires readers to take a deep breath and sigh along with Ginsberg: “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?” In Greek mythology, Charon was the aged boatman charged with the responsibility of ferrying the souls of the deceased to Hades, the god of death. By allowing Whitman to get out of Charon’s boat, Ginsberg places him in an unresolved state. The boat disappears on the Lethe, the underworld’s river of forgetfulness. Greek mythology provides that the spirits of the dead would drink from its waters to forget the sorrows of their earthly existence before entering Elysium, a land of perfect peace and happiness. Myth, however, also provides that when Aeneas, the Trojan prince, visited the underworld, he saw many such souls wandering on the banks of the Lethe because before the spirits could live in the world above, they must drink from the river to forget the happiness of Elysium. Whitman is left standing on the bank filled with the sorrow of the world and not yet partaking in the bliss of Elysium, which has long been regarded as the place where the souls of dead poets go to rest as a reward for their virtuousness in life. Readers are left with an impression of Whitman watching the world around him literally going to hell.
Ginsberg’s admiration for Whitman continued throughout his life. Many years after writing “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg reaffirmed his great respect for Whitman in his 1984 poem “I Love Old Whitman So.” Written while Ginsberg was in Baoding, China, this effusive tribute recalls images from Leaves of Grass and Whitman’s allembracing sense of humanity. Ginsberg was still touched by what he deems Whitman’s “desperado farewell”: “Who touches this book touches a man.” Ginsberg lived in that grand humanistic tradition and expanded on Whitman’s democratic vision.
Unlike Whitman, who never received the recognition he deserved during his lifetime, many contemporaries appreciated Ginsberg’s “barbaric yawp.” When he died in 1997, Ginsberg was praised by Charles McGrath in his article “Street Singer” because he “liberated poetry from the library and took it boldly into cafes and onto the street corner. He believed in poetry of the people, not the professoriate.” Ginsberg was what Whitman always wanted to be—a poet of the people. In the eulogistic poem for himself, “Death & Fame,” Ginsberg catalogs the eclectic assortment of people he envisioned attending his funeral. At the end of the poem he states: “Everyone knew they were part of ‘History’ except the deceased / who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive.” Perhaps he did not know “exactly what was happening,” but he certainly had the keen ability to comment on the times.
Source: Marisa Anne Pagnattaro, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.
Chris Semansky
Chris Semansky is a published poet who regularly writes essays and reviews of modern and contemporary poetry. In the following essay, Semansky characterizes “A Supermarket in California” as a lament about the materialistic, spiritually vapid culture of mid-twentieth-century America that underscores the inherent conflict embodied in living in an advanced capitalist country and the emotional and psychologically devastating effects of such conflict.
When we talk about tone in literature, we refer to the stance or attitude the speaker has toward his listener or audience and to the subject of the work. The audience for “A Supermarket in California” is complicated in that the speaker is addressing both Walt Whitman—or at least an idea of who Whitman was (his ghost)—and a public that is (ostensibly) sympathetic to the poet’s feelings about America. The poet’s own contradictory attitude toward Whitman mirrors his ambivalent attitude about America. On the one hand, he dreams of Whitman’s poetry, his “enumerations,” and allies with him in the poem, “[striding] down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy.” Conversely, however, he refers to Whitman as a “lonely old grubber” who talks to bananas and pork chops. Similarly, while praising the United States for its
“... Ginsberg ... implicitly critiques the American Dream, suggesting that it has become a nightmare of conformism and emptiness.”
material abundance (after all, the poem is set in a supermarket) and choice, waxing ecstatic at “Whole families shopping at night!”, Ginsberg also implicitly critiques the American Dream, suggesting that it has become a nightmare of conformism and emptiness. Whereas once the American Dream represented individuality, a strong sense of community, and freedom from tyrannical work conditions, it now means slavery to an eight-to-five job, a house like every other house in a suburb like every other suburb, and a gas-guzzling automobile to take us to and from the cities where we work. For many Americans, Ginsberg suggests, pursuit of the Dream has come at a high cost. We find ourselves working longer hours, commuting greater distances, and spending the remaining time recovering in front of the television. This attitude is most evident when he asks Whitman if they will “... stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?”
The imagery in “A Supermarket in California” is almost typically Romantic, highlighting the difficulty the speaker has in thinking any one way about America. As with Romantic lyric poetry, the natural world is used as a setting for the speaker’s meditation on a weighty subject. In the opening stanza we see the speaker walking alone under trees, “looking at the full moon.” This peace and solitude affords him the opportunity to dream, which he does, of “a neon fruit supermarket.” By setting the poem in a supermarket, Ginsberg zeroes in on what is almost an embarrassment of riches and choice in the industrialized Western world; by using the adjectives “neon fruit,” Ginsberg underscores the gaudy aspect of so much conspicuous consumption, perhaps even punning on his own sexuality (“fruit” being a derogatory term for a homosexual). These contradictions, while illustrating the speaker’s conflict, are also a staple of surrealist verse. As an aesthetic and social movement, Surrealism advocated unfettering the conscious mind and removing what it saw as barriers to creativity and true expression. The resultant reality would be a “surreality,” the prefix “sur” meaning over or above. Many surrealist poets, such as Andre Breton and Louis Aragon, practiced what they called automatic writing, whose purpose is to explore the materials of the unconscious mind without any preconceptions about what might be found there. For Ginsberg and his Beat contemporaries, automatic writing became one of the primary means of composition, because they distrusted logical reason and the world of appearances, and because they believed it put them in touch with a deeper, more authentic, self—above the selves they presented to society.
The difficulty Ginsberg has in arriving at any resolution to what America is or can be also points to his own alienation, not only from the country, but also from the process of writing and owning his own poems. In Marxist theory alienation in capitalist societies occurs when human beings no longer recognize themselves in the objects that they produce; they feel separated both from the objects and from one another, as they now see others as merely cogs in the machine of capital. Put another way, social relations become market relations. It was common during the 1950s and especially the 1960s to hear about young people’s alienation from society. Popular history has it that many felt that they no longer had control over their own lives or decision-making processes. Ginsberg himself even suggested that madness was the only sane response to a mad world. Making Whitman the conduit for Ginsberg’s own vision of America demonstrates what little control the poet felt he had over his own writing. His dependence on the vision of others only highlights the paucity of his own; similarly, his poetic style, derivative of Whitman and Blake’s, dramatically highlights the difficulty of making something original. By asking Whitman which way the country is headed, Ginsberg demonstrates his own confusion in reading present reality. Calling on Whitman as his muse shows the importance of the past in understanding the present. That Whitman himself offers no resolution to Ginsberg’s questions suggests that the country is beyond logic and repair and has entered the very dreamworld to which Ginsberg has escaped.
The supermarket’s significance as a meeting ground of influences, past and present, should not be taken lightly. As the physical church for the new American religion of shopping, the supermarket actually enables the difficulty the speaker of the poem has in reaching a decision about America. Do I love it? Do I hate it? Should I buy the Post-Toasties or the Cocoa Puffs? Ecovision toilet paper or Charmin? Two-ply or four? Pesticide-free, organically grown, lower-fat California avocadoes? Or the local variety? The abundance of choice invades the poetic process itself, as the poet goes “shopping for images.” Inspiration has become commodity; individuality just another brand name to be packaged and marketed along with everything else. This is not necessarily a far cry from the America that Whitman described in Leaves of Grass where, though he championed humanity’s (and his own) indomitable spirit and capacity to transcend circumstance, he also showed its seamy underside— its violence, cruelty, and weakness. What would Whitman have thought if he were alive in 1955 to witness what had transpired in the sixty years between his death and the birth of Ginsberg’s poem? And what vision of America did he have in mind when he finally died in 1892? Would Whitman’s answers have helped Ginsberg resolve his own spiritual confusion, or are the questions themselves merely rhetorical? That is, does Ginsberg merely ask them for effect, already knowing the answers? Or, like Whitman, is Ginsberg’s asking of the questions just another instance of his own attempt to contain within himself all of the possibilities of the universe, both good and evil, question and answer? If we look at “A Supermarket in California” in relation to the other poems in Howl, we can see that Ginsberg’s stance toward America is unequivocally bleak. In Part II of “Howl,” Ginsberg presents Moloch, an Old Testament God of the Ammonites and Phoenicians to whom children were sacrificed, as a symbol of America’s social ills: “Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! / Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!” If Ginsberg were to incorporate “A Supermarket in California” into “Howl,” perhaps he would have written, “Moloch whose eternal aisles of tangerines and kiwis lead us into hell.” But bleak as Ginsberg’s America appears, he still retains a smidgen of hope. Michael Davidson writes in The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century that if “Whitman is placed in Hell ... [it is] not by his disbelief but because of his extreme faith.” This is the faith that Ginsberg, along with Whitman’s mantle, has inherited. It is a roughed-up faith, but it is a faith that Ginsberg nonetheless desires his readers to buy.
Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.
Sources
Ammons, R. S., “Ginsberg’s New Poems,” Poetry, June 1964, pp. 186-87.
Breslin, James E., “Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,’” From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 77-109.
Breslin, Paul, “Allen Ginsberg as Representative Man: The Road to Naropa,” The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 22-41.
Dickey, James, “From Babel to Byzantium,” Sewanee Review, Summer 1957, pp. 509-10.
Ehrlich, J. W., ed., Howl of the Censor, San Carlos, CA: Nourse Publishing Co., 1961.
Ginsberg, Allen, “Death & Fame,” New Yorker, April 21, 1997, pp. 80-81.
———,“I Love Old Whitman So,” White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985, New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
———,Selected Poems 1947-1995, New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Howard, Richard, “Allen Ginsberg,” Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, New York: Atheneum, 1980, pp. 176-183.
Hyde, Lewis, ed., On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.
Kramer, Jane, Allen Ginsberg in America, New York: Paragon House, 1969.
Kraus, Michelle, Allen Ginsberg: An Annotated Bibliography, 1969-1977, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980.
McGrath, Charles, “Street Singer,” New York Times Book Review, April 27, 1997, p. 43.
Merrill, Thomas F., Allen Ginsberg, Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Miles, Barry, Ginsberg: A Biography, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Molesworth, Charles, “Republican Objects and Utopian Moments: The Poetry of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg,” The Fierce Embrace, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979, pp. 37-60.
Mottram, Eric, Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties, Brighton, England: Unicorn Bookshop, 1972.
On the Edge: A New History of 20th-century America, edited by David A. Horowitz, Peter N. Carroll, and David D. Lee, Los Angeles: West Publishing Co., 1990.
Perloff, Marjorie, “A Lion in Our Living Room: Reading Allen Ginsberg in the Eighties,” Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990, pp. 199-230.
Portuges, Paul Cornel, The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg, Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erickson, 1978.
Rosenthal, M. L., and Sally M. Gall, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 422-28.
Schumacher, Michael, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Stauffer, Donald Barlow, A Short History of American Poetry, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.
Stepanchev, Stephen, American Poetry Since 1945, New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1967.
For Further Study
Davidson, Michael, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
One of the most provocative and informative studies of the San Francisco Renaissance ever written. Davidson places Ginsberg squarely in the tradition of Romantic poets while exploring the myths surrounding modern Romantic poets.
Knight, Arthur and Kit, eds., Kerouac and the Beats: A Primary Sourcebook, New York: Paragon House, 1988.
A collection of correspondence and interviews of Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Philp Whalen, and William Burroughs.
Mersmann, James F., Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry against the War, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974.
A historical account of American poets who were actively opposing the war in Vietnam.
Parkinson, Thomas, ed., A Casebook on the Beat, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961.
An intelligent assessment of Ginsberg’s place among Beat writers and poets.
Podhoretz, Norman, “My War With Allen Ginsberg,” in Commentary, August 1997, Vol. 104, No. 2, pp. 27-40.
A first-person historical account of a conservative Jewish literary critic’s fifty-year (mostly adversarial) relationship with Allen Ginsberg.