![]() But for nearly a year afterward, Ginsberg revised, reorganized and reshaped it, section by section, word by word. The first draft of “Howl” poured out of him. He would sing of himself and his country, with its “infernal bombs,” “industries / of night” and “dreams / of war.” Nothing would stop him, not his own “solitary craze” and certainly not the conformity of the times - the Eisenhower era, the Cold War - that seemed so antithetical to rebels with or without causes. He wanted to write an explosive, apocalyptic poem befitting the Atomic Age. In California in 1954 - the year the nation began to emerge from McCarthyism, the Korean War and legal segregation in the South - Ginsberg began to shed his New York skin and cast himself as a wild West Coast poet. It was time for him to take his rightful place, or so he thought, with Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams in the poet pantheon. His name was Allen Ginsberg, and after traveling from New York to Havana and through the jungles of Mexico, he was eager to write the great American poem. ![]() ![]() Fifty years ago, an unpublished 28-year-old American poet came into the United States at Mexicali dreaming of literary glory. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |