Allen Ginsberg's Poetry: A Form of Protest, Revolt, and Rebellion (original) (raw)

Rebellion in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg M. A. Thesis

2001

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) is one of the most celebrated and popular poets in contemporary America. The title poem of his first published collection, Howl and Other Poems (1956), established him as a major poet of rebellion. From that time and for three decades, Ginsberg went on preaching rebellion both in word and in deed. This study tries to reveal and assess the full implications of Ginsberg’s rebellion. It tries to show the scope, causes and nature of his rebellion and to place him in the long tradition of rebellion in American literature. However, more than the mere investigation of the political, social, spiritual and literary aspects that Ginsberg rebelled against, the main aim of this study is to find out a link or a unified theory that combines all these aspects of rebellion. The study tries also to find a suitable critical approach to Ginsberg’s poetry.

Poetic Language Rises against Political Pressure: Deconstructive Strategies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time in the Wake of Political Conformism in Post-war America, and Civil Rights Movement.

Within the thought frame of Foucault and Derrida, post-structuralism serves as a methodology that could offer ways to study contemporary societies and their ways of looking at knowledge as a set of discursive formations when it comes to culture, language, ​and society. In relation to this perspective, poets Amiri Baraka, and Allen Ginsberg are important figures in the sense that they were interrogative for the taken for granted assumptions and practiced with language in their poetic aesthetics in order to deconstruct the discursive knowledge that is taken as absolute and necessary. As the American society was regulated by the dominant political ideologies that structured the predominance of patriarchy and white supremacy, they used language and poetry as their deconstructive methods in order to offer alternative texts that subverted these political and discursive structures and spoke for minorities that were excluded by these discursive formations.

When Private is Public: The Functions of Madness in Allen Ginsberg's Poetry During 1956-1961

2019

America encountered considerable changes after WWII, recovering from the effects of the Great Depression and WWII while its people lived in paranoia of the Cold War. It was in this period that the Beat Movement arose as a form of counterculture defying the conventional values that they found limiting to the freedom of an individual. Allen Ginsberg gained public attention when his first book Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956. His poem “Howl” was praised for its frankness and straightforward contents while criticized for its obscenity, culminating in the court’s ruling the poem not obscene. This study delves into poems published in three of Ginsberg’s works — Howl and Other Poems (1956), Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), and Empty Mirror: Early Poems(1961)—in other to examine the functions of madness in his writings. By drawing connection to Ginsberg’s biography, letters between Ginsberg and friends, and his poetry, this paper scrutinizes social influences on the portrayal of the personal life and explores how Ginsberg use a story of his own or through a persona to portray and conceptualize madness. Madness in his poems could be observed through his poetic form, vulgarity in diction, radical contents, and the equivocation between the holy and the profane. It is found that Ginsberg does not only use madness to dedicate to an individual such as Carl Solomon in “Howl” and Naomi Ginsberg in “Kaddish”, but also uses it to address social issues on the topics of homosexuality, psychological traumas, freedom of expression and so on, the topics of which dominate the personal and public space but hardly spoken out publicly.

Allen Ginsberg: Private Rebellion and Public Dissent

2011

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Beyond Reason: Allen Ginsberg's Cultural and Communicative Revival of William Blake

The present paper uses Jan Assmann’s acceptance of cultural and communicative memory, intertwining them in order to attest the cultural and communicative revival of William Blake’s spiritual vision in the context of Allen Ginsberg’s conceptualization of post-war, American hyper-rationalization and the moulding of his Beat(ific) counterculture. Just as the English bard had had visions of his poetic predecessors, Ginsberg hallucinated of “Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war” and had a life-changing auditory experience that marked his calling to be a prophet. Blake’s Ginsbergian revival is both communicative and cultural because on the one hand it is inspired by a vision, a prophetic direct connection with the English bard that verbally communicated his personal representation of the past and on the other hand, Blake’s prophecies and influential literary writings render him a specialized bearer of memory and a shaper of cultural memory. As the destructive, egocentric, single-minded use of reason travels from Urizen to Moloch and from the Age of Reason to the Cold War years, so does the need to poetically prophesize the downfall of people who let themselves bound my “mind-forged manacles” and consequently forget about their inherent and infinite divinity. Echoing William Blake, yet adapting the poet’s philosophy to the cultural context of mid twentieth century America, Allen Ginsberg denounces the sleep of reason and the destructive power of the science of despair built upon the machinery of reason, as well as the resulted proneness towards egocentrism, materialism and conformism at the detriment of visionary imagination, spontaneity and spirituality.

Alienation and dissent in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Fadhil Al-Azzawi

2020

APA Citation Geninah, F. (2020).Alienation and dissent in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Fadhil Al-Azzawi [Master’s thesis, the American University in Cairo]. AUC Knowledge Fountain. https://fount.aucegypt.edu/etds/826 MLA Citation Geninah, Farah. Alienation and dissent in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Fadhil Al-Azzawi. 2020. American University in Cairo, Master's thesis. AUC Knowledge Fountain. https://fount.aucegypt.edu/etds/826

Emmanuel Levinas and Allen Ginsberg: Prophecy and Poetry

This paper is an exploration of the affinity between Levinas" ethics as metaphysics in Totality and Infinity and the ethical critique of American capitalism found in Allen Ginsberg"s Howl. In this paper I attempt to extend Levinas" account of the metaphysical structure of my relation to the Other into a means of criticizing the ethical axioms of contemporary social institutions. I draw upon both Levinas" work in Totality and Infinity and Ginsberg"s poem Howl.

Minute Particulars of the Counter- Culture:Time, Life, and the Photo-poetics of Allen Ginsberg

Comparative American Studies, 2012

Recent exhibitions of Allen Ginsberg's photographs, which feature 1950s snapshots of his fellow-Beats Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, have been dismissed by some as marketing exercises for the Beat myth that promote their biocentric image. Ginsberg himself invited comparisons between his work and Robert Frank's The Americans. However, a detailed material analysis of his work as a poet-photographer, paying close attention to his handwritten captions, recognises it as a complex hybrid that extends his prophetic poetics. In particular, contextualising his work in relation to the 1950s photojournalism of Life and Time establishes the ways in which Ginsberg, and Burroughs, responded to the attacks made on the Beats in those magazines on behalf of Henry Luce's 'American Century'.