The prominent title of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America” presents the poem as a political commentary. Poetic evidence supports this superficial political meaning, as the poem is presented as a dramatic monologue between the speaker and the country of America. Despite what seems to be a concrete interpretation, the poem’s meaning can in fact be destabilized through the use of a specific literary lens. Application of a psychoanalytical lens dissects the façade of activism in “America” and shows that it is actually an introspective poem delving into the speaker’s own psyche. Psychoanalytical evidence exists within the poem, and it can be readily supported by biographical evidence of the poem’s author, Allen Ginsberg. The political meaning of “America” …show more content…
The political veil placed upon “America” provides meaning to the poem that initially seems stable. At first, the opposition between the speaker and America, a metonym for the entire entity of the United States of America, may be viewed as a way to distance the speaker’s own political position from the embodiment of American ideals and transgressions. This opposition illustrates the inherent evil of America’s actions and heightens the speaker’s own position as superior in comparison; this is suggested by the aggression towards America when the speaker states, “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” (Ginsberg 5). The speaker’s repulsion towards America creates a binary opposition between the two entities that prescribes a political message that the speaker is condemning political America. However, through a psychoanalytic lens, the personified America is used to displace and project the speaker’s self-insecurity onto a more easily acceptable antagonist (Tyson 15). That is to say, the speaker has used the image of America as a personification …show more content…
To further substantiate the connection between Russia and the mother, the poem provides a personal anecdote of the speaker’s childhood experience: “America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings” (68). This anecdote highlights the influence of Russia, the speaker’s mother, on his early childhood, which in turn emphasizes the effects on his present mental composition. Biographical evidence of Allen Ginsberg provides information on the dysfunctional relationship between Ginsberg and his mother; this can then be ascribed to the conflict between America, the speaker, and Russia, his mother. In the biographical study American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, Jonah Raskin supplies a biographical account of Allen Ginsberg’s abnormal relationship with his mother. Raskin explains, “On at least one occasion, [Ginsberg’s mother] lay in bed naked, beckoning to [Ginsberg] to make love to her” (32). Raskin continues, stating, “In Kaddish, [Ginsberg] returned to the traumatic seduction scene in length and in detail. ‘One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her,’ he wrote” (32). This event in Ginsberg’s childhood can viewed as the basis of an oedipal complex, “a dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex
Throughout the words and the lives of the Beat Generation, one theme is apparent: America, everywhere from Allen Ginsberg’s “America,” to Jack Kerouac’s love for Thomas Wolfe. Although the views of America differ, they all find some reason to focus in on this land. Ginsberg, in his poem “America,” makes a point that not many of us can see as obvious: “It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again.” Each and every one of us make up America, and when we complain about something that is wrong, we are complaining about ourselves. Being raised by his mother as a Communist, and being homosexual, Ginsberg found many things wrong with America, and he does his fare share of complaining, but at the end he decides, “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” Ginsberg didn’t want to sit and watch everything go wrong. He was going to do something, despite the fact that he was not the ideal American.
The speaker refers to the supermarket as “neon” and describes “Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!” (XX). Fruits are natural, but Ginsberg describes the families of this America as packaged implying a fascination with consumerism that Americans have developed. These families seem at a glance ideal and perfect, but upon a closer glance they are disturbingly inorganic. Throughout the poem he continues his characterization of the modern America. At the end of the poem Ginsberg calls on, “the lost America of love”(XX) when questioning what he will do. This phrase highlights what America is for Ginsberg creates and instant dichotomy of what America used to be. America used to be something greater, but its current direction is isolating to Ginsberg. Characterizing this depraved America is not enough for Ginsberg; he calls on how we can confront this
The poem “America” by Tony Hoagland reflects on how peoples’ minds are clouded by small-scale items, money, and the unimportance of those items. Metaphors and imagery are utilized to emphasize the unimportance of materialistic items in America. How America is being flooded with unnecessary goods. The poem uses examples of people to create an example and connection to the overall meaning.
Poems are forms of communication that give an applicable view of the past, present and future events. Reading the poem titled “America”, written by Richard Blanco brought me memories from my childhood in my parent’s house and also what is happening now in my house as a parent. The poem explains how one person doesn’t have all the knowledge about something. It also, describes the daily life struggles I experienced during my childhood, when my parent 's and I moved from our hometown to live in another town becuase of their work and it brings to light the conflict of cultures I and my children are going through since we moved to United State of America .
The nature of an ideology is completely personal; one’s interpretation may vary greatly from another’s interpretation. This is demonstrated in the two poems, “America” by Claude McKay and “Let America be America Again” by Langston Hughes. Both of these poems emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and though these two poems each describe an ideological viewpoint of America as a place and a concept, the two speakers view the subject differently from one another. Both poets employ similar sound devices, yet the tones and themes vary between the two works.
"Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,We, the people, must redeemThe land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.The mountains and the endless plain—All, all the stretch of these great green states—And make America again!” The free America is actually not free, the words on the constitution are just words. The dream has fade away. All these hard working people, all of their bloods and tears had really make the 1 percent of the American’s American dream came true. The reality is such a chaos for the narrator. he has suffered so much from this reality, so he now wants to share his idea to all the readers and try to wake them up, this is not the America that want, this is not the society they want. The American dream does not exist.
In Allen Ginsberg's "America," written in January of 1956, the author admits "I am obsessed with Time Magazine. I read it every week" (Ginsberg 46-47). For this reason I have chosen issue number 24 of volume LXVI of Time, published December 12, 1955, to illustrate Ginsberg's influences by the current national and world events of his time. The cover of this issue depicts the jolly St. Nick behind the beaming bald head of toymaker Louis Marx. This joyous illustration projects how the media sought to spread happiness and Christmas cheer despite national woes such as nuclear arms threats and the country's slow movement toward national desegregation. Ginsberg's dramatic monologue, "America," demonstrates his emotions tied to the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movements which were occurring in the 1950s. In this essay I will examine how Allen Ginsberg's concerns with national policies presented in the poem "America" reflect national concerns as seen in three articles from this edition of Time Magazine including "RACES: Armageddon to Go," "COMMUNISTS: Bhai Bhai in India," and "Science: Radioactivity from Russia."
Moving forward in stanza one, Ginsberg says he knows what he’s doing. In line twenty-five he uses imagery when saying, “Plum blossoms are falling” (Ginsberg). When plum blossoms fall, it usually means that the beauty of spring is over. Ginsberg feels here that the idea of a wonderful America is fading. No doubt, America is full of violence and that is what seems to be overtaking line twenty-six. Therefore, the speaker continues to tell America that he has sympathy for labors and that he is not sorry that he was a communist.
These constant feelings of discontent, and annoyance were seen frequently by African Americans who suffered from injustice acts from the white majority during these times. Many of the poems written during this time showed some sort of historical reference of maltreatment, or inequality. For years, African Americans were not allowed to have a voice, and if they did they wen’t unheard. However, when poems got published, the deep emotion, and rage that African Americans lived through for many years was released to the public, and shocked a majority of people when they quickly became influential to society.
After Ginsberg’s high school graduation in June of 1943 he immediately enrolled in Columbia University in New York City on a scholarship from the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in Paterson. In his early journals, he confessed that one of the primary reasons he applied to Columbia was because his secret crush, Paul Roth, had gone to Columbia a year earlier (Ginsberg). It was this secret, the proximity to his home in New Jersey, its credibility as a university, and the fact that it was his father’s alma mater that made Columbia Ginsberg’s first choice in colleges. He began classes right after graduation during the summer term, endeavoring to become a labor lawyer. He did, however, continue to contribute to literature and worked to pursue his hobby of writing. He not only submitted works for Columbia’s literary journal, the Columbia Review, but he also wrote for the Jester humor magazine, served as president for Columbia’s literary and debate group, the Philolexian Society, and won the Woodberry Poetry Prize in 1946 (Miles). Despite his growing success as a writer, Ginsberg continued pursuing law. One might think that his time as a law student at Columbia was a waste considering his passion for writing and the success it brought him later in life. On the contrary, his passion for law was nearly as powerful as his passion for literature and instilled in him the fierce opinions and beliefs that he used in his work and that he fought for as a social activist. Ginsberg would surely have become a lawyer had he not met the friends that would one day be known as the “Beat Generation” writers that changed the direction of his life forever.
Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” criticizes America during the midst of the twentieth century in which society had acquired an attitude that heavily valued the materialistic aspects of life. In order to efficiently express the speaker’s discontent with society, he paints images by using vivid detail throughout the entire poem to allow the reader to experience what the speaker experiences himself. He begins by describing the setting on the streets of California, “I walked down the sidestreets under the trees…/… looking at the full moon” (2-3) and had thoughts of Walt Whitman, a nineteenth century poet whom Ginsberg deeply admired. The setting is essential as it describes the two worlds in which the speaker lives in; one represented by the metropolitan landscape of downtown California and another represented by nature, which the speaker longs to be a part of. The speaker describes himself as a lost soul in search of satisfaction in conventional America, a place where he does no...
Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey on June 2nd, 1926. He experienced a very troubled childhood. His mother, Naomi, suffered from multiple mental illnesses and was institutionalized several times. These problems left Ginsberg feeling emotionally distraught and confused. This is reflected in Ginsberg's later poems since the mother helped to determine his overall character and outlook in very important ways. In his adolescence, he began to feel an increased awareness of his homosexuality which he kept very private until his twenties. Ginsberg was first introduced to poetry by his father who was a high school teacher and a poet. However, it was not until Ginsberg’s affiliation with William Carlos Williams that he began to attain a severe interest in poetry. Williams became something of a mentor to the young Ginsberg. Ginsberg’s literary choice was further influenced by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, whom which he had made acquaintances with through classes at Columbia University. Columbia is actually where he established powerful friendships with writers William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac. “This group, along with several West Coast writers that included Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others, would form the core of the Beat movement” (The Beat Generation vol 2: 363). To be understood, the Beat movement, also called the Beat Generation, was an American social and literary movement that originated in the 1950s. The members of this movement, including Ginsberg, were self-proclaimed as "beat", which was originally meant to describe them as weary, downtrodden individuals. This meaning later took on a more musical sense t...
“A Supermarket in California” written by Allen Ginsberg, illustrates a colorful happy supermarket where the speaker strolls through. Later on, we come to find that the speaker finds his crush or another man that he is interested in, Walt Whitman. The speaker shows signs of lust through his constant questioning of Whitman: “Will we wander through silent streets alone?” Throughout the poem the speaker is rebelling against society loving a man of the same-sex in a public place, letting his homosexuality shed light. Through the parallel structure provided in the plot, Allen Ginsberg argues that loving a man isn't any different from loving a woman; there are still questions about mutual feelings and uncertainty.
Allen Ginsberg and his friends were the founding fathers of the Beat Generation. They advocated gay rights, anti-war movements, protested the Vietnam War and promoted "Flower Power" to everyone. The beat poets, including Ginsberg, spread the need for widespread acceptance and love as well as creating a turning point for society that opened people's minds and allowed them to accept the less desired values in life. Ginsberg ultimately helped shape this distinct generation and became recognized as one of America's premier writers and artistic icons through his famous poem “Howl” and many others. This literary movement and the unique work that came out of it dramatically influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II