Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
AMIRI BARAKA
Poet, writer, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in
1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent
three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia
University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka was well known for his strident
social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that made it difficult for some audiences
and critics to respond with objectivity to his works. Throughout most of his career his method
in poetry, drama, fiction, and essays was confrontational, calculated to shock and awaken
audiences to the political concerns of black Americans. For decades, Baraka was one of the
most prominent voices in the world of American literature.
Baraka’s own political stance changed several times, thus dividing his oeuvre into periods: as
a member of the avant-garde during the 1950s, Baraka—writing as Leroi Jones—was
associated with Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; in the ‘60s, he moved to
Harlem and became a Black Nationalist; in the ‘70s, he was involved in third-world liberation
movements and identified as a Marxist. More recently, Baraka was accused of anti-Semitism
for his poem “Somebody Blew up America,” written in response to the September 11 attacks.
Baraka incited controversy throughout his career. He was praised for speaking out against
oppression as well as accused of fostering hate. Critical opinion has been sharply divided
between those who agree, with Dissent contributor Stanley Kaufman, that Baraka’s race and
political moment have created his celebrity, and those who feel that Baraka stands among the
most important writers of the twentieth century. In the American Book Review, Arnold
Rampersad counted Baraka with Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence
Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison “as one of
the eight figures . . . who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary
culture.”
Baraka did not always identify with radical politics, nor did his writing always court
controversy. During the 1950s Baraka lived in Greenwich Village, befriending Beat poets
Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The white avant-garde—primarily
Ginsberg, O’Hara, and leader of the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson—and Baraka
believed in poetry as a process of discovery rather than an exercise in fulfilling traditional
expectations. In 1958 Baraka founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press, important forums
for new verse. He was married to his co-editor, Hettie Cohen, from 1960 to 1965. His first
play, A Good Girl Is Hard to Find, was produced at Sterington House in Montclair, New
Jersey, that same year. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Baraka’s first published
collection of poems appeared in 1961. M.L. Rosenthal wrote in The New Poets: American
and British Poetry since World War II that these poems show Baraka’s “natural gift for quick,
vivid imagery and spontaneous humor.” Rosenthal also praised the “sardonic or sensuous or
slangily knowledgeable passages” that fill the early poems. While the cadence of blues and
many allusions to black culture are found in the poems, the subject of blackness does not
predominate. Throughout, rather, the poet shows his integrated, Bohemian social roots. The
book’s last line is “You are / as any other sad man here / american.”
With the rise of the civil rights movement Baraka’s works took on a more militant tone. His
trip to Cuba in 1959 marked an important turning point in his life. His view of his role as a
writer, the purpose of art, and the degree to which ethnic awareness deserved to be his subject
changed dramatically. In Cuba he met writers and artists from third world countries whose
political concerns included the fight against poverty, famine, and oppressive governments. In
Home: Social Essa ys (1966), Baraka explains how he tried to defend himself against their
accusations of self-indulgence, and was further challenged by Jaime Shelley, a Mexican poet,
who said, “‘In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got
millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.’” Soon
Baraka began to identify with third world writers and to write poems and plays with strong
political messages.
Dutchman, a play of entrapment in which a white woman and a middle-class black man both
express their murderous hatred on a subway, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1964.
While other dramatists of the time were wedded to naturalism, Baraka used symbolism and
other experimental techniques to enhance the play’s emotional impact. The play established
Baraka’s reputation as a playwright and has been often anthologized and performed. It won
the Village Voice Obie Award in 1964 and was later made into a film. The plays and poems
following Dutchman expressed Baraka’s increasing disappointment with white America and
his growing need to separate from it. Critics observed that as Baraka’s poems became more
politically intense, they left behind some of the flawless technique of the earlier poems.
Richard Howard wrote of The Dead Lecturer (1964) in the Nation: “These are the agonized
poems of a man writing to save his skin, or at least to settle in it, and so urgent is their purpose
that not one of them can trouble to be perfect.”
To make a clean break with the Beat influence, Baraka turned to writing fiction in the mid-
1960s, penning The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), a novel, and Tales (1967), a collection of
short stories. The stories are “‘fugitive narratives’ that describe the harried flight of an
intensely self-conscious Afro-American artist/intellectual from neo-slavery of blinding,
neutralizing whiteness, where the area of struggle is basically within the mind,” Robert Elliot
Fox wrote in Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi
Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. The role of violent action in achieving
political change is more prominent in these stories, as is the role of music in black life.
In addition to his poems, novels and politically-charged essays, Baraka is a noted writer of
music criticism. His classic history Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963)
traces black music from slavery to contemporary jazz. Finding indigenous black art forms was
important to Baraka in the ‘60s, as he was searching for a more authentic voice for his own
poetry. Baraka became known as an articulate jazz critic and a perceptive observer of social
change. As Clyde Taylor stated in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, “The connection
he nailed down between the many faces of black music, the sociological sets that nurtured
them, and their symbolic evolutions through socio-economic changes, in Blues People, is his
most durable conception, as well as probably the one most indispensable thing said about
black music.” Baraka also published the important studies Black Music (1968) and The
Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987). Lloyd W. Brown commented in Amiri Baraka
that Baraka’s essays on music are flawless: “As historian, musicological analyst, or as a
journalist covering a particular performance Baraka always commands attention because of
his obvious knowledge of the subject and because of a style that is engaging and persuasive
even when the sentiments are questionable and controversial.”
After Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was killed in 1965, Baraka moved to Harlem and
founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The Black Arts Movement helped develop
a new aesthetic for black art and Baraka was its primary theorist. Black American artists
should follow “black,” not “white” standards of beauty and value, he maintained, and should
stop looking to white culture for validation. The black artist’s role, he wrote in Home: Social
Essays (1966), is to “aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.” Foremost in this
endeavor was the imperative to portray society and its ills faithfully so that the portrayal
would move people to take necessary corrective action. He married his second wife, Amina,
in 1967. In that same year, Baraka published the poetry collection Black Magic, which
chronicles his separation from white culture and values while displaying his mastery of poetic
technique. There was no doubt that Baraka’s political concerns superseded his just claims to
literary excellence, and critics struggled to respond to the political content of the works. Some
felt the best art must be apolitical and dismissed Baraka’s newer work as “a loss to literature.”
Kenneth Rexroth wrote in With Eye and Ear that Baraka “has succumbed to the temptation to
become a professional Race Man of the most irresponsible sort. . . . His loss to literature is
more serious than any literary casualty of the Second War.” In 1966 Bakara moved back to
Newark, New Jersey, and a year later changed his name to the Bantuized Muslim appellation
Imamu (“spiritual leader,” later dropped) Ameer (later Amiri, “prince”) Baraka (“blessing”).
By the early 1970s Baraka was recognized as an influential African-American writer. Randall
noted in Black World that younger black poets Nikki Giovanni and Don L. Lee (later Haki R.
Madhubuti) were “learning from LeRoi Jones, a man versed in German philosophy, conscious
of literary tradition . . . who uses the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy in his System of
Dante’s Hell and the punctuation, spelling and line divisions of sophisticated contemporary
poets.” More importantly, Arnold Rampersad wrote in the American Book Review, “More
than any other black poet . . . he taught younger black poets of the generation past how to
respond poetically to their lived experience, rather than to depend as artists on embalmed
reputations and outmoded rhetorical strategies derived from a culture often substantially
different from their own.”
After coming to see Black Nationalism as a destructive form of racism, Baraka denounced it
in 1974 and became a third world socialist. He produced a number of Marxist poetry
collections and plays in the 1970s that reflected his newly adopted political goals. Critics
contended that works like the essays collected in Daggers and Javelins (1984) lack the
emotional power of the works from his Black Nationalist period. However, Joe Weixlmann,
in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, argued against the tendency to categorize the
radical Baraka instead of analyze him: “At the very least, dismissing someone with a label
does not make for very satisfactory scholarship. Initially, Baraka’s reputation as a writer and
thinker derived from a recognition of the talents with which he is so obviously endowed. The
subsequent assaults on that reputation have, too frequently, derived from concerns which
should be extrinsic to informed criticism.”
In more recent years, recognition of Baraka’s impact on late 20th century American culture
has resulted in the publication of several anthologies of his literary oeuvre. The LeRoi
Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1999) presents a thorough overview of the writer’s development,
covering the period from 1957 to 1983. The volume presents Baraka’s work from four
different periods and emphasizes lesser-known works rather than the author’s most famous
writings. Transbluency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995),
published in 1995, was hailed by Daniel L. Guillory in Library Journal as “critically
important.” And Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, commended the “lyric boldness of this
passionate collection.” Kamau Brathwaite described Baraka’s 2004 collection, Somebody
Blew up America & Other Poems, as “one more mark in modern Black radical and
revolutionary cultural reconstruction.” The book contains Baraka’s controversial poem of the
same name, which he wrote as New Jersey’s poet laureate. After the poem’s publication,
public outcry became so great that the governor of New Jersey took action to abolish the
position. Baraka sued, though the United States Court of Appeals eventually ruled that state
officials were immune from such charges.
Baraka’s legacy as a major poet of the second half of the 20th century remains matched by his
importance as a cultural and political leader. His influence on younger writers has been
significant and widespread, and as a leader of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s Baraka
did much to define and support black literature’s mission into the next century. His
experimental fiction of the 1960s is considered some of the most significant African-
American fiction since that of Jean Toomer. Writers from other ethnic groups have credited
Baraka with opening “tightly guarded doors” in the white publishing establishment, noted
Maurice Kenney in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, who added: “We’d all still be
waiting the invitation from the New Yorker without him. He taught us how to claim it and
take it.”
Baraka was recognized for his work through a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Rockefeller
Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New
York. He was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Arts. He died in 2014.
An Agony. As Now.
BY AMIRI BARAKA
I am inside someone
wretched women.
that forest.
given to love.
screams.
How does the poem fit read the beat generation movement Langston Hughes, …, Amiri
Baraka himself? How does it fit with that culture? How does it fit the beat generation?
The person in whom the poet resides does not love him. Nor does the poet love him, as made
clear from the lines that follow: because he is confined to this persona (mask), the poet has no
other way except to look through his eyes, breathe through his nose and endure the women he
loves. The poem manages to create a very deep rift between his two selves, the poet and the
man. As the rift is too deep to be bridged, we can say the poet is in a schizophrenic state.
That poem begins with the writer in an existential crisis: “I am inside someone/who hates me.
I look/out from his eyes. Smell/what fouled tunes come in/ to his breath. Love his/wretched
women.” And it ends with the writer trying to fight his way out of it: “It burns the thing/inside
it. And that thing/screams.”
A certain kind of American reader loved Baraka for capturing an outsider’s anger, and giving
it form and voice and beauty. Even his name was a kind of poem: The former LeRoi Jones
took a name that meant “blessed prince” in Swahili. His fans that night wanted Baraka to be
that poet again. But Baraka didn’t like to think of himself as a performer. He looked up at us
from over the tops of his glasses and gave us all an irritated look./his emotians are quite
complicated here, and he has a dilemma he does not know how to feel about it.
Baraka’s life carried him across a variety of American literary and social movements: from
The Beats to Black Nationalism to Marxism. He “joined” each movement when it was still a
dangerous and edgy thing to do, and floated away from each movement when it became more
settled and mainstream. In his later years, he seemed to embrace being irascible and
provocative for its own sake, as with the poem he wrote (as poet laureate of New Jersey, no
less) following the 9/11 attacks. It repeated the canard that “4,000 Israeli workers” had stayed
away from the World Trade Center towers because they had been forewarned of the attack.
Most of the people joined together his anger with his humanity, compassion and love of
language. His political statements, by contrast, had all the subtlety of pornography, with
ample use of fascist and Third Reich analogies.
At Rutgers in the 1990s, he compared his academic foes to Goebbels. But his poetry could be
magic, and called forth magic often, as in the beautiful manifesto of Ka'Ba.
"We have been captured,/and we labor to make our getaway, into/the ancient image; into a
new/Correspondence with ourselves/and our Black family. We need magic/now we need the
spells, to raise up/return, destroy, and create. What will be/the sacred word?"
The second stanza carries the idea of the man wearing a mask forward. It is not a mask that
one can easily cast off as it is made of metal and there is only a “slit” for the eyes to see the
“glance of light.” The flesh that rubs against him, whether that of a man or a woman, offers
him no human contact, no sense of warmth. Obviously the armour that he has does not allow
him to establish any such intimacy. If the first stanza made the division within the poet clear,
the second stanza shows the poet alienated from others.
The “enclosure” shows him to be a captive within himself. It neither allows him to escape nor
does it allow others access to him. The sense of tangibility, as if someone is touching him,
could have been the touch of his soul, if he had managed to retain it. The blindness he talks
about could be spiritual blindness, a state in which he gave up his soul but which fills him
with regret now. His enemies who carry him away are confused whether he should be
considered beautiful or pitiable. It shows that the poet is in a state of dilemma as to his own
condition.
The weight of the person whom he hates but in whom he is condemned to live presses against
him, heavier and heavier. It causes pain. But the poet had to go through a range of painful
experiences. The woman he loved had left him in preference for some other values (the
values of the whites?) is a source of another kind of pain. Or it might be the pain of the mind
trying to ascend the heights of heaven where god resides. This attempt ends in vain. The yeses
which follow can be acts of affirmation that the poet made: The first “yes” is followed by
reference to “his books,” the act of writing or reading, through which the poet expresses
himself, a justifiable act given the schizophrenia he has, a therapeutic act. The second “yes”
precedes the act of creating an “object of beauty” made of “wet sentences.”
“Cold men in their gale” and “ecstasy” in which the distinction between flesh and soul is
gone, blown robes and empty bowls create an image of hallucination, perhaps drug-induced
(Ecstasy?), corruption setting in.
In the midst of this rather depressing scene, there comes a cold wind blowing, and the poet
experiences “human love” within the “white hot metal” shell he has created for himself.
Trapped inside the “hot metal” of his former self, which is incapable of experiencing love, the
poet feels excruciating pain making his real self “scream.”
One of the perplexing ironies of recent theoretical work on ethnic writing and the ethnic self
in Afro-American literature is that work's tendency to exclude any serious discussion of the
writer who, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, sought an art form that would
express the radical, singular ethnicity of African American existence. Amiri Baraka, whose
explorations and experiments as an avant-garde poet span more than three decades, had
helped to establish the problematic of African American ethnicity and of a radical black
subjectivity in his role as the organizer and leader of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and
co-founder of the idea of a black aesthetic. This benign neglect, which usually confines itself
to a few obligatory remarks on Baraka's lasting influence, is all the more perplexing when we
consider that several new volumes of his work have been published in the last decade. (1) The
reasons for the present neglect are several. Undoubtedly, Baraka's outspoken and
uncompromising political commitment to black revolution from his earlier days as a cultural
nationalist to his present affiliations with Third World Marxism renders him less than
palatable to the now-institutionalized study of ethnic literature. However, political stance
alone does not deny such a writer admission to the new canon. Of a more present concern are
certain critiques, labeled as "postmodern," leveled against the Idea of "blackness" as a narrow
metaphysical form of essentialism, which is said to uphold the political and aesthetic
principles of the Black Power Movement and its artistic counterpart, the Black Arts
Movement. Houston Baker serves as a prime example of this. Although he claims a lasting
spiritual kinship based on his own involvement during the decade of the 1960s, in retrospect
he finds BAM unable to properly theorize the culturally specific aspects of Afro-American
literature and culture because the Movement's artistic aims rested on the assumption that there
exist unique aspects of African American creative expression in the form of music and
performance, aspects that "lay closest to the verifiable emotional referents and experiential
categories of African American culture." Such an assumption led the members of BAM,
including Baraka, to construct an aesthetic theory that was based on "cultural holism," which
not only relies heavily on the Herderian and Romantic idea of the Volk, but implies an
"impressionistic chauvinism" that in the final analysis represents a modified form of intuition;
that is, a direct and immediate vision of the essence of blackness. Commenting upon Stephen
Henderson's theory of black poetry, Baker finds that his idea of a unique and separate Black
Aesthetic simply inverts the humanist principles of an integrationist poetics and then
constructs an ontology of blackness that leads to the closure of meaning and, with it, the
closure of culture: "For it is, finally, only the black imagination that can experience blackness,
in poetry or in life" (Baker 74, 81). Despite the validity of Baker's critique, what is disturbing
about his treatment is the ease with which the BAM and Baraka are classified as an important
though underdeveloped stage in the process of creating a black ethnic writing--a process that
has reached fruition, we are led to believe, in recent postmodern fiction. Moreover, his and
other "postmodern" critiques have a tendency to pass over certain radical artistic possibilities
that Baraka had explored with an uncommon rigor, possibilities that have remained unthought
and which may, ironically enough, represent a far more radical attempt to articulate a
heterogeneous black self than more recent writing that favors the narrative deconstruction and
reconstruction of identity in an often autobiographical or quasi-autobiographical style.
This essay proposes to reexamine the central task of Amiri Baraka's poet- ry within both the
period of the Black Arts Movement and beyond. This reex- amination is necessary because
Baraka had begun to explore the possibility for a singular and uncanny idea of African
American ethnicity that could only be adequately expressed outside of the sociological and
cultural-anthropologi- cal constructions of origin and identity. This singular, black ethnicity
he describes as a boundary between two impossible cultural-ethical positions:
The Negro could not ever become white and that was his strength; at some point, always, he
could not par- ticipate in the dominant tenor of the white man's culture, yet he came to
understand that culture as well as the white man. . . . It was at this juncture that he had to
make use of other resources, whether African, sub-cultur- al, or hermetic. And it was this
bound- ary, this no-man's land that provided the logic and beauty of his music. And this is the
only way for the Negro artist to provide his version of America from that no-man's land
outside the mainstream. A no-man's land, a black country, completely invisible to white
America, but so essentially part of it as to stain its whole being an ominous gray. ("Myth" 11)
Neither inside nor outside, the African American encounters his authentic self on a boundary
which is never a point or position of identity but an "in- between" which can only be
conceptu- alized as a movement between two cul- tural limits, a movement that suspends
both, and which displaces the possibili- ty of establishing a self-identity by recourse to a
founding myth-where, in short, the traditional notion of the ethnic as originary becomes
impossi- ble. Moreover, this "in-between" only comes to life aesthetically rather than as a
representation, through a music whose beauty does not simply consist in mixing the sounds of
two traditions, but in the disappropriation or trans- gression of each. What I propose to show
is how Baraka's formulation of this impossible space of ethnicity at an early stage of his
writing career - impossible as a space or place from which to define oneself-forces us to
rethink prevailing notions of the rela- tion between ethnicity and marginality: Not only is the
opposition between the margin and the center unsuitable as a way of understanding Baraka's
explo- rations, but he displaces its binary logic, a logic which continues to entrap certain
postmodern ethnic theories in a traditional and all-too-Western ethics of Self-creation through
Self-represen- tation
The ethics and ethnicity of the "no- man's land" repeat in a profound and searching way the
basic condition of African American existence articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois as "double-
con- sciousness." But unlike Du Bois, who sought to solve the problem by envi- sioning a
dialectical Aufhebung of a divided self into the actual and con- crete self-consciousness of
universal humanity, Baraka finds this gray- stained landscape one that cannot be reconciled
according to a dialectic that raises to a higher truth the alienated consciousness, whereby the
African- American is forced to see him/herself through the eyes of the other. Baraka's radical
interrogation of the ethnic must be read through Du Bois's founding idea, but what Baraka
encounters is the beauty of a music-a non-presentable trace that unworks the false reconcilia-
tion implicit in the very term African American-whose poetic Saying has defined his
endeavors ever since.
In recent studies of Baraka's work, one of the few critics to undertake a sustained revaluation
of the nature and function of ethnic writing has been William J. Harris.3 In his book The
Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic, Harris advances the provocative
argument that Baraka lib- erated himself from the influence of the white avant-garde by
creating a method of writing that both destroyed and transformed the aesthetic basis of that
tradition, radical though it was, into a properly black idiom. Harris's argument constitutes an
effective rejoinder to those critics who common- ly assert that Baraka lost his initial bril-
liance and creative energy in his later "Marxist" phase. Drawing upon the rhetorical reading
strategies of Henry Louis Gates, Harris identifies a distinct method in Baraka's work
beginning with certain poems in The Dead Lecturer and steadily developing through Black
Magic Poetry until it reaches its comple- tion in improvisational poems such as In the
Tradition and Wise, Why's Y's, a method that first inverts and parodies existing tropes,
symbols, and poetic forms and then transforms them into a new aesthetic construction which
he calls the "Jazz Aesthetic." This new aesthetic does not consist of a separate and separatist,
essentially black sensi- bility; on the contrary, Harris insists that what is "properly" black is
the lin- guistic structure of inversion, a process of creative destruction which he claims has
operated in black value systems for quite a long time-and the model for this process comes
from the most indigenous of all the black arts, name- ly, music, and jazz in particular.
Baraka's accomplishment, we are told, was to merge improvisational tech- niques with poetic
composition so as to liberate words from their conventional significations-a symptom of the
Western penchant for abstraction which freezes the moment and lifts the concrete thing into
the bloodless realm of ideas-and to open language toward its true essence in the form of a
creative play of the Word itself, a play of rhythm and harmony, association and combination
from which "sense" first emerges. However improvisation is not a technique in the restricted
sense of a formal method, but is rather an aes- thetic and an ethic at the same time; the
improvisational parody of motifs from the dominant Western tradition becomes a way of
voiding them of their content in order to infuse them with values from a different world view,
but this transmutation can only be accom- plished through the process of inver- sion.
To summarize;
In “As Agony, As Now”, Amiri Baraka illustrates a need for action through descriptions of
inaction and immobility.
In the poem, the narrator states he is literally trapped inside someone or something else. This
sets the reader up to feel controlled. Some imagery points to a suit of armor, however, it could
also be argued that the narrator is trapped in a coffin (or similar device). This is best
demonstrated by the fact that whatever is holding the narrator hostage is burning him, and
Baraka also uses imagery of a skeleton, blindness, immobility, and various forms of
inactivity. The images of immobility are various, such as the total immobility of a tree, the
apparent mobility but true immobility of the sun, the dependent mobility of a suit of armor,
and lastly the total immobility of a coffin.
The imagery of a coffin brings to my mind Dante’s Inferno, when Dante is in the Sixth Circle
(Heretics) and finds souls being burned eternally in sealed coffins. Given that in “A Poem
Some People Will Have to Understand”, the narrator claims, “I am no longer a credit / to my
race (6-7)”, it could be argued that Baraka is implicating himself as a heretic (to his race,
perhaps).
Now let us assume the narrator is encased in a suit of armor, as the line “Slits in the metal, for
sun (7)” implies. A suit of armor cannot move independently, and it is hollow. The Oxford
English Dictionary (online) cites many definitions for the word “hollow,” including, but not
limited to, “having a hole or cavity inside,” the traditional sense of the word; and also “[a] call
to excite attention.” Perhaps another way to think of this metallic shell, more in line with the
idea of a coffin, is that of the Iron Maiden.
In either case, the main focus of Baraka’s agency panic in “As Agony, As Now” is
demonstrated through the verbs used. Only one action is attributed to the enclosure (“It burns
the thing / inside it (43-5)”, while the narrator has most actions committed against him or her
(“enemies carry me (17)”, “hard flesh / rubbed against me (9-10)”. The only action that seems
attributed to the narrator is in the first stanza, referring to moving his or her eyes, smelling
what this Other smells, and loving who the Other loves.
ALLEN GINSBERG
One of the most respected Beat writers and acclaimed American poets of his generation, Allen
Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey and raised in nearby Paterson, the
son of an English teacher and Russian expatriate. Ginsberg’s early life was marked by his
mother’s psychological troubles, including a series of nervous breakdowns. In 1943, while
studying at Columbia University, Ginsberg befriended William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac,
and the trio later established themselves as pivotal figures in the Beat Movement. Known for
their unconventional views, and frequently rambunctious behavior, Ginsberg and his friends
also experimented with drugs. On one occasion, Ginsberg used his college dorm room to store
stolen goods acquired by an acquaintance. Faced with prosecution, Ginsberg decided to plead
insanity and subsequently spent several months in a mental institution. After graduating from
Columbia, Ginsberg remained in New York City and worked various jobs. In 1954, however,
he moved to San Francisco, where the Beat Movement was developing through the activities
of such poets as Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Ginsberg first came to public attention in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other
Poems. “Howl,” a long-lined poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is an outcry of rage and
despair against a destructive, abusive society. Kevin O’Sullivan, writing in Newsmakers,
deemed “Howl” “an angry, sexually explicit poem” and added that it is “considered by many
to be a revolutionary event in American poetry.” The poem’s raw, honest language and its
“Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath,” as Ginsberg called it, stunned many traditional critics.
James Dickey, for instance, referred to “Howl” as “a whipped-up state of excitement” and
concluded that “it takes more than this to make poetry.” Other critics responded more
positively. Richard Eberhart, for example, called “Howl” “a powerful work, cutting through
to dynamic meaning…It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which
kills the spirit…Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love.” Paul
Carroll judged it “one of the milestones of the generation.” Appraising the impact of “Howl,”
Paul Zweig noted that it “almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditionalist poetry of the
1950s.”
In addition to stunning critics, Howl stunned the San Francisco Police Department. Because
of the graphic sexual language of the poem, they declared the book obscene and arrested the
publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The ensuing trial attracted national attention, as
prominent literary figures such as Mark Schorer, Kenneth Rexroth, and Walter Van Tilberg
Clark spoke in defense of Howl. Schorer testified that “Ginsberg uses the rhythms of ordinary
speech and also the diction of ordinary speech. I would say the poem uses necessarily the
language of vulgarity.” Clark called Howl “the work of a thoroughly honest poet, who is also
a highly competent technician.” The testimony eventually persuaded Judge Clayton W. Horn
to rule that Howl was not obscene. The qualities cited in its defense helped make Howl the
manifesto of the Beat literary movement. Including such novelists as Jack Kerouac and
William Burroughs and poets Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Ginsberg,
the Beats wrote in the language of the street about previously forbidden and unliterary topics.
The ideas and art of the Beats greatly influenced popular culture in America during the 1950s
and 1960s.
A major theme in Ginsberg’s life and poetry was politics. Kenneth Rexroth called this aspect
of Ginsberg’s work “an almost perfect fulfillment of the long, Whitman, Populist, social
revolutionary tradition in American poetry.” In a number of poems, Ginsberg refers to the
union struggles of the 1930s, popular radical figures, the McCarthy red hunts, and other leftist
touchstones. In “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” he attempts to end the Vietnam War through a kind
of magical, poetic evocation. In “Plutonian Ode,” a similar feat—ending the dangers of
nuclear power through the magic of a poet’s breath—is attempted. Other poems, such as
“Howl,” although not expressly political in nature, are nonetheless considered by many critics
to contain strong social criticism.
Ginsberg’s political activities were called strongly libertarian in nature, echoing his poetic
preference for individual expression over traditional structure. In the mid-1960s he was
closely associated with the counterculture and antiwar movements. He created and advocated
“flower power,” a strategy in which antiwar demonstrators would promote positive values like
peace and love to dramatize their opposition to the death and destruction caused by the
Vietnam War. The use of flowers, bells, smiles, and mantras (sacred chants) became common
among demonstrators for some time. In 1967 Ginsberg was an organizer of the “Gathering of
the Tribes for a Human Be-In,” an event modeled after the Hindu mela, a religious festival. It
was the first of the countercultural festivals and served as an inspiration for hundreds of
others. In 1969, when some antiwar activists staged an “exorcism of the Pentagon,” Ginsberg
composed the mantra they chanted. He testified for the defense in the Chicago Seven
Conspiracy Trial, in which antiwar activists were charged with “conspiracy to cross state lines
to promote a riot.”
Ginsberg’s political activities caused him problems in other countries as well. In 1965 he
visited Cuba as a correspondent for Evergreen Review. After he complained about the
treatment of gay people at the University of Havana, the government asked Ginsberg to leave
the country. In the same year the poet traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he was elected
“King of May” by thousands of Czech citizens. The next day the Czech government requested
that he leave, ostensibly because he was “sloppy and degenerate.” Ginsberg attributes his
expulsion to the Czech secret police being embarrassed by the acclaim given to “a bearded
American fairy dope poet.”
Another continuing concern reflected in Ginsberg’s poetry was a focus on the spiritual and
visionary. His interest in these matters was inspired by a series of visions he had while
reading William Blake‘s poetry. Ginsberg recalled hearing “a very deep earthen grave voice
in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.” He added
that “the peculiar quality of the voice was something unforgettable because it was like God
had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living
Creator speaking to his son.” Such visions prompted an interest in mysticism that led
Ginsberg to experiment, for a time, with various drugs. He claimed that some of his best
poetry was written under the influence of drugs: the second part of “Howl“ with peyote,
“Kaddish“ with amphetamines, and “Wales—A Visitation” with LSD. After a journey to
India in 1962, however, during which he was introduced to meditation and yoga, Ginsberg
changed his attitude towards drugs. He became convinced that meditation and yoga were far
superior in raising one’s consciousness, while still maintaining that psychedelics could prove
helpful in writing poetry. Psychedelics, he said, are “a variant of yoga and [the] exploration of
consciousness.”
Ginsberg’s study of Eastern religions was spurred on by his discovery of mantras, rhythmic
chants used for spiritual effects. Their use of rhythm, breath, and elemental sounds seemed to
him a kind of poetry. In a number of poems he incorporated mantras into the body of the text,
transforming the work into a kind of poetic prayer. During poetry readings he often began by
chanting a mantra in order to set the proper mood. His interest in Eastern religions eventually
led him to the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Buddhist abbot from Tibet who had
a strong influence on Ginsberg’s writing. The early 1970s found the poet taking classes at
Trungpa’s Naropa Institute in Colorado as well as teaching poetry classes there. In 1972
Ginsberg took the Refuge and Boddhisattva vows, formally committing himself to the
Buddhist faith.
How did Ginsberg want to be remembered? “As someone in the tradition of the oldtime
American transcendentalist individualism,” he said, “from that old gnostic tradition…
Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman…just carrying it on into the 20th century.” Ginsberg once
explained that among human faults he was most tolerant of anger; in his friends he most
appreciated tranquility and sexual tenderness; his ideal occupation would be “articulating
feelings in company.” “Like it or not, no voice better echoes his times than Mr. Ginsberg’s,”
concluded a reviewer in the Economist. “He was a bridge between the literary avant-garde
and pop culture.”
Within the social and political contexts of the mid-twentieth century, Allen Ginsberg’s
“Howl” was an outcry “of rage and despair against a destructive, abusive society” (“Allen
Ginsberg: 1926-1997”). The poem marked a turning point in the development of Beat
literature, but more importantly, it acted as a “desperate plea for humanity and a song of
liberation” from Eisenhower-era social conventions (“Allen Ginsberg”). The poem’s
publication in 1956 not only led to public outrage over its use of taboo subjects such as human
sexuality and recreational drug use, but it also assisted in spawning the Beat movement,
which was widely regarded as a battle against “social conformity and literary tradition” (“A
Brief Guide”). As a “primal release of pent-up frustration and rage” against the social norms
of post- World War II America, “Howl” expressed “the ideals and anxieties of a generation
alienated from mainstream society” (“The Censorship of Allen”).
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural
darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
Through rambling, stream-of-consciousness syntax, and rapid-fire imagery, the verse of
“Howl” deviates from the conventions of traditional poetry, and expands to include for the
mind’s eye whatever rested in Ginsberg’s subconscious mind (Ginsberg 1-4). Instead of
writing to satisfy the conventions of traditional poetry, Ginsberg concentrated more on his
view of the world in the poem, disregarding what convention demanded and satisfying his
own desire for free-expression.
In an act of defiance against the cultural and social norms of the 1950s, Ginsberg used the
poem as a symbolic podium from which to declare his artistic and personal freedom from the
tyranny of conformity that he and other Beats felt threatened by within American society.
Poet Richard Eberhart regarded the poem as “a howl against everything in our mechanistic
civilization which kills the spirit,” reflecting the Beat generation’s “wholesale reappraisal of
the conventional structures of society” (“Allan Ginsberg: 1926-1997”; Rahn). Other scholars,
however, believed the poem linked “the visionary and the concrete, the language of mystical
illumination and the language of the street,” allowing the reader an opportunity to become
immersed in “the most sordid of contemporary realities” and escape the tyranny of conformity
through a “transcendent vision” elicited through the tantalizing prosody of Ginsberg’s verse
(Breslin). In this sense, “Howl” was more of an invitation to the world of the counter-culture
than a declaration of war against societal norms. According to Professor James Breslin,
Ginsberg used Part I to immerse the reader in “the extremities of modern urban life” by
depicting his generation’s “best minds” as adopting attitudes of “defiance, longing, terror,
zaniness, hysteria, prayer, anger, joy, tears, exhaustion—culminating in the absolutes of
madness and suicide.” Leading the audience into the underworld of modern urban life,
Ginsberg, like Virgil to the traveler in Dante’s Inferno, regarded himself as a guide,
encouraging the reader to confront and deny the power of “Moloch,” or the “vast, all-
encompassing social reality that is at best unresponsive…at worst a malign presence that
feeds off individuality and difference.” Breslin contends that Ginsberg used Part III to create a
dramatic shift from “self-consuming rage to renewal in love,” or an “apocalyptic release” in
which the self breaks free of the tyranny of conformity (e.g., Moloch), in order to reveal that
from “the ordeal of separation,” and through “the casting out of the principles of division,” the
process of unification can happen within the self.
The academic community of the 1950s derided the Beats as “anti-intellectual and unrefined,”
and mainstream America was horrified “by their supposed sexual deviancy and illicit drug
use” (Rahn). However, the publication of “Howl” forced America to question societal norms
and created opportunities for the counter-culture to break down social barriers. Through the
publication of “Howl,” Ginsberg gave a voice to the Beat generation’s need to rage against
conformity, and in doing so, he not only broadened the scope of what the academic
community considered “acceptable literature,” but also spawned the Beat movement.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. The opening line of Howl is
not metaphorical, but rather literal. Only a few poets have succeeded in capturing the
terrifying picture of physical and emotional collapse, yet Allen Ginsberg managed to do just
that. In Howl, Ginsberg illustrated the chaotic atmosphere of post-war America and described
the sufferings of his generation. Madness, chaos, and hysteria were central themes of
Ginsberg’s life, making it the heart of his work. This paper discussed the main aspects of
madness and chaos represented in Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl.
The first section of Howl gives an overview of the suffering of the “best minds” of Ginsberg’s
generation. One of the main themes that influenced the representation of madness in Howl
were sexuality and drug use. Certainly, from the promiscuous acts described in the poem,
Ginsberg’s unresolved sexuality seems to have driven him madder than anything else (Raskin
14). One of the main inspirations for this was Neal Cassady, Ginsberg’s friend, and lover who
he mentions as “N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver” (12).
Ginsberg even wrote in his journal how Neal’s madness made him think that he is indeed mad
as his mind was “crazed by homosexuality” (Raskin 14). Cassady was a lady’s man which is
evident in Kerouac’s character of Dean Moriarty, who was inspired by him. This could have
fuelled Ginsberg’s madness as he describes Cassady as
—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards,
moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar
roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, &
hometown alleys too. (Ginsberg 12)
Moreover, “literature, though does not provide a definition of madness, provides the
representation of madness as human experience through the medium of language.”
(Ridwansyah 5). Ginsberg used explicit language throughout Howl with lines describing how
they “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
/who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and
Caribbean love” (Ginsberg 12). This type of behaviour was “stepping outside the realm of
normal behaviour in post-war America” which made one “likely to get thrown into a
straitjacket” (Russel 14). By rejecting the norms of the society, “the Beats searched for ways
of seeing the world differently from the rest of the herd” which eventually led to “madness,
drugs, sex and crime [that] all offered ways of finding a new vision of life and a new way of
living” (Russel 15). Drugs were, in particular, “an integral part of the lives and work of many
Beat writers” (Ridwansyah 5). Ginsberg describes their addiction while they were “dragging
themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix” (9). Furthermore,
peyote and benzedrine were popular drugs amongst the Beat poets that are also mentioned in
the poem: “who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine” (Ginsberg 10). According to Ginsberg “each line of the poem Howl is
ideally read in one breath” which “creates the sensation of fatigue and restlessness on the
reader after reading it, which is related to the drug-induced madness depicted in the poem”
(Ridwansyah 6). The condition of the “best minds” is described with adjectives such as
“starving”, “hysterical”, and “naked” (Ginsberg 9) which further intensifies the visual
imagery of madness. Ridwansyah describes drug use in this context as “a form of madness:
the kind of voluntary madness induced by chemical substances” which lead many Beat writers
to mental instability (5).
The chaos of the “nation of madhouses” is clearly presented in the second section of
the poem, “the nightmare of Moloch … the heavy judger of men” (Gisnberg 17), where the
author demonstrated how his generation was “martyred on the crucible of convention and
materialism” (Tytell 9). Even the tone changes in this segment into “a more staccato terror
punctuated by exclamation marks signifying horror, a total of eighty-eight of them employed
in the fifteen strophes of the section” (Tytell 9). Horror was the current atmosphere of
America: “Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children
screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!”
(Ginsberg 17). Ridwansyah describes how, being part of the post-World War II America, the
literature had the ability to represent madness not only through the depiction of mental
disorders, but also in the basic condition in which America has found itself in (5). This
condition was described through Moloch as “incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone
soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch
the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!” (Ginsberg 17). Earlier in his life,
Ginsberg played with the idea that America was a prison and a concentration camp, and
through that metaphor expressed his anger and hostility towards the country (Raskin 119).
Ginsberg clearly criticized America’s government and the consumerism ruling the society.
Moloch’s mind is “pure machinery” and his “blood is running money” with “ten armies” as
his fingers (Ginsberg 17). Tytell states that “for Ginsberg the corporate-military complex, the
careerism and consumerism it uses as inducements for the suspension of human values, is
exactly what his ‘best minds’ are desperate or brave enough to reject” (9). Furthermore,
Ginsberg argued that the society was “one of complete anarchy, violent chaos, This type of
“violent chaos” was exactly what destroyed the minds of the Beat Generation, driving them to
“clinical hysteria” and complete madness.
As has been said, madness and chaos were central themes of, not only Howl, but
Ginsberg’s life as well. The chaos ruling the post-war American society forced Ginsberg’s
generation to reject society’s consumerism and the norms that were forced upon them.
Subsequently, unsolved sexuality and drug use induced madness which eventually made them
the outcasts of the society. Ginsberg’s personal experience with mental disorders, drug use,
and sexuality led to the perfect depiction of the sufferings the “best minds” of his generation
went through.