Allen Ginsberg: A Jew and the City

Introduction

The sub-head I’ve chosen might be a bit confusing at first, but it’s just a reference to HBO’s hit show “Sex and the City” that I find funny. After a brief introduction of the Beat “movement” and Allen Ginsberg’s life and work, in the main part of my paper I attempt to examine two topics related to Ginsberg: his relationship with his religious roots, Judaism, through some sections of his poem, “Kaddish”. Then, I introduce the book “Reality Sandwiches”, and his famous “relationship” with New York City, through his poem “To My Sad Self”. Since it’s a complex and meaningful poem, I’s also give a conclusion about some of the things he cared about, some of the things he found worth to examine, some of his thoughts about the world we are living in.

Beat Generation

The Beat Generation was a group of American post-war writers, ruling the literary areas in the 1950’s. However, “Beat” was not just a literary style, but a way of life and thinking. Central elements of "Beat" scene included experimentation with drugs and alternative forms of sexuality, interest in Eastern philosophy and religion, and strong rejection of materialism and capitalism. Since a lot of them was left-wing or even communist, the McCarthy-era handled them as ‘enemies of the state’. Most of the beatniks (as they called themselves) integrated into the Hippie Subculture in the 1960’s. The most significant works of the era includes Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road” (1957), William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” (1959) and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956). One of the main contributors of the movement was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who invented City Lights Publisher, which gave a good alternative to artist not finding proper and understanding publishers due to the e...

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...uncertainty about serious questions (death and life, origin of mankind, existence of God), this appears in the very last line, which is a reference back to line 22. In “My Sad Self”, NYC becomes the metaphor of these questions.

Conclusion

Ginsberg constantly tried to find answers for his questions, just like many of his contemporaries. In a social and political system that artificially generated happiness, and constantly does nowadays, this kind of “inquiring” is one of the most challenging tasks of Man, but at least leads to great literary works.

Works Cited

-BOLLOBÁS Enikő: Az Amerikai Irodalom Története

-DOCHERTY, Brian: On "Love Poem on a Theme by Whitman"

-GINSBERG, Allen: Selected Poems, 1947-1995

-GINSBERG, Allen: Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1995

-MILES, Barry: Ginsberg: A Biography

-The American Poetry Review, July/August, 1997