Content area
Full Text
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman.
-Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"
Much has been said about the influence of Walt Whitman on Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg frequently mentioned Whitman as an influence and even portrayed the nineteenth century poet, "poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys" in his 1955 poem "A Supermarket in California" (4). Both Whitman and Ginsberg wrote long line, free verse poetry about New York and America, poetry for and about common people that was denounced as vulgar and censored during their lives. William Patrick Jeffs argues that it was this unreceptive political climate that drove Ginsberg to Whitman: that "America's climate of war and its economics of capitalism engendered a race of hypermasculine men, a race that Ginsberg juxtaposes with his emphasis on Whitmanic, tenderly comradeship" (72). "Ginsberg, like Whitman," Jeffs explains, "represents a poet who through his relentless law-breaking and language-breaking opened new ground in American poetry and poetics" (72). Neeli Cherkovski similarly argues that both Whitman and Ginsberg advocated a "fervent adhesion of man to man" love and the idea that laws should only exist "to aid man in an ever-evolving articulation of liberty" (220). While it is undeniably true that Ginsberg rebelled against his "hypermasculine" wartime culture in favor of Whitman's vision of camaraderie, it should be noted that Whitman, too, lived in a climate of war. And while Ginsberg did respond to Cold War America with Whitmanian poetry, the two poets could not have had more divergent views of war itself. Where much of Ginsberg's poetry is overtly political and harshly anti-war, Whitman was often an adamantly pro-war poet.
In the poem "Eighteen Sixty-One," for example, Walt Whitman addresses the year in which he was writing, personifying it as an individual man "clothed in blue clothes" (4), who exists in his own time and space: "Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you, as one of the workmen, the dwellers in Manhattan; Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and Indiana ... southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers" (8-9, 12). By having a fixed moment in time march spatially, south, clothed in the blue uniform of a Union soldier, Whitman symbolically conscripts the entire year...