Allen Ginsberg And Walt Whitman's Song Of Myself

Allen Ginsberg’s, “Howl”, was written 100 years later than Walt Whitman’s, “Song of Myself”. These two poems share similarities of speaking on America but in different time eras. Whitman’s poem inspired Ginsberg to write an extension of his poem by remixing it in a more angry and free willed way. By revising the style and the theme of Whitman’s poem, Ginsberg revisits and repurposes it with a strong expression of how much he disagrees with the judgmental American society he’s living in in a very obscene way while also embracing who he really is and not denying it.
Of course Ginsberg is not angry at Whitman, nor disagreeing. Ginsberg is just flat out unhappy with the American way of life that he’s living in. He’s angry with hope for the America in his time era to be the America Whitman describes in his poem. Clearly Ginsberg is highly disappointed with his country. He explains in his first line of “Howl” how he “saw the best minds” of his “generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”(2540). He modifies how the best minds of his generation is being

In his poem he is trying to tell the audience how instead of the free spirited America Whitman lived in, his America cared more about rules and standards over opportunity and free will. He explains America’s lack of open minds for the people who wanted to be free to be themselves when he states, “ .. and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head.. And blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love..”(2545). As a matter of fact, this influenced him to want to write on splitting away from that American culture and express himself with nothing but