Allen Ginsberg

After taking a look at and annotating some poems from Allen Ginsberg, I have noticed many common parts that appear in his poetry.   I chose Ginsberg almost blindly, only scanning “Homework” before putting him on the list of choices and hoping that no one had already picked him.  The first similarity I saw is that many of his works share the theme that there is much wrong with the world, specifically the United States.  “Homework” and “America” both point to situations such as pollution or abuses that reveal Ginsberg’s pessimism toward the world in his time.  Since he wrote poetry at around the time of the Cold War, I was not surprised that he had problems with the way that America was handling situations such as stockpiling nuclear weapons and ignoring the environmental consequences of the country’s actions.  Ginsberg’s poetry is also strictly free verse and includes many allusions to events well-known to people of the 1950s.  Readers of his time as well as those who know a good bit about twentieth-century history would be able to understand every reference that he makes, which gives each of his poems an even stronger impact.  These common elements of Ginsberg’s poetry really unify his work even though he uses very different lengths and main strategies to convey his negative feelings toward the world.  I started off with “Homework” and “America” to prepare myself for “Howl,” Ginsberg’s monstrously long masterpiece.   I did not have too much trouble analyzing the former two, but “Howl” is more than twice the length of “America,” taking up five pages of paper and including much longer trains of thought.  It is going to take me at least a few more days to fully grasp “Howl” because it is unlike any other poem I have ever seen before.  “Homework” and “America” at least had shorter verses to help me soak in all of the information more clearly, but “Howl” sometimes has lines that could be worth their own paragraphs.  I am very interested to see what I will find from “Howl” as I begin to tackle it this week, and I know that it will be worth the read.