Walt Whitman's Influence on Allen Ginsberg

Walt Whitman can claim many literary descendants including writers of prose as well as poetry. The voice that shaped Leaves of Grass has certainly shaped the work of Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet whose most famous work is directly reminiscent of Walt Whitman.

"Howl" and the Whitman Style of Poetry

To take one Allen Ginsberg poem as an example, we might draw a parallel between "Howl" and the poetic style carved out by Walt Whitman.

I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...

...angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night.
(from Howl!)

The use of litany characterizes "Howl" as it characterizes much of Walt Whitmans poetry.

Liberated from any need for rhyme or fixed meter, choosing instead to emphasize the act of identifying and naming the inhabitants of a specific and charged world, "Howl" specifically references many of Whitman's works.

Ginsberg repeats the term "who" to open many of the lines in part I of "Howl", Whitman often used such devices of repeated identification as we can see here in Song of Myself:

It cannot fall the young man who died and was buried,
Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,
Nor the little child that peep'd in at the door, and then drew back
and was never seen again,
Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with
bitterness worse than gall,
Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,
Nor the numberless slaughter'd and wreck'd, nor the brutish koboo
call'd the ordure of humanity... (Song of Myself, pt.43)

These stylistic similarities are perfectly direct and clear even upon a first reading, so it comes as no surprise to find wide-spread acknowledgement of the stylistic relationships between Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman: Ginsberg's poetry with its exhilarating openness of subject and form and visionary qualities owes much to a tradition stretching back through Walt Whitman to William Blake.¹Whitman saw the function of the poet to express himself in verse. The true successor to Whitman was the radical American poet and subversive Allen Ginsberg. ²

Defining a World

Allen Ginsberg's poem "A Supermarket in California" is a famous homage to the American Romantic poet, drawing a clear line of ideas from the 1850's to the 1950's. In particular the notions shared between the two poets are centered on a desire for a personal connection with the world at large, a kind of mystical will to be incorporated into the world moment.

Ginsberg, like Whitman before him, went to great lengths to define that "world at large" and to characterize both the society in which he lived and the passionate desire to love it and be a part of it even when that world proved itself to be unlovable.

The Individual and Society

Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman also both emphasized ideas of individuality, drawing attention to the fact that society is made up entirely of individuals.

Both poets suggested directly that though society may influence us to hold certain values, all of us may choose to actively participate in the mechanisms of culture and work to create new norms and new value systems.

"Song of Myself" is a testament to this idea of speaking truth to (collective) power. Walt Whitman's self-published work, Leaves of Grass, set out to explore the nature of individuality while also situating the individual in relation to his society.

Whitman was emphatically uncompromising in his own values in his poetry. He tackled difficult intellectual subjects with remarkable honesty. Allen Ginsberg did the same in writing about the complexity of self, sexuality in America, drugs and many more controversial subjects.

While Walt Whitman tended to focus on philosophical and metaphysical subjects, he too explored taboo sexuality and challenged the prevailing moral strictures of his day.

More from This Contributor:

Writers of the USA's East Coast

Wallace Stevens & the 3 Planes of Reality

Sources:

A Supermarket in California

Ginsberg Official Site
1 Whitman & Allen Ginsberg Poetic Legacies

2. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1547

Ginsberg Bio

Text of Song of Myself