America. Sunflower sutra.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg /ˈɡɪnzbərɡ/ (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem "Howl", in which he celebrated his fellow "angel-headed hipsters" and harshly denounced what he saw as the destructive forces ofcapitalism and conformity in the United States.

Though the term "Beat" is most accurately applied to Ginsberg and his closest friends (Corso, Orlovsky, Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.), the term "Beat Generation" has become associated with many of the other poets Ginsberg met and became friends with in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired. Central elements of "Beat" culture included experimentation with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.

"America" was written in 1956 during Ginsberg's time in Berkeley, California and was included in the original publication of "Howl and Other Poems." “America” was one of the first widely read literary statements of political unrest in the post-World War II United States. Themes from the decade’s previous wars are prominent such as the nuclear bomb or Asian foreign policy, yet the poem also seems prescient in its depiction of national racial unrest and the fight with communism that would characterize the Cold War foreign policy positions of the United States in the second half of the 20th century. Ginsberg was always one of the most politically active members of the Beat Poets and “America” is both an introduction to Ginsberg’s political thought as well as a broad representation of views he would hold throughout his life.

Like "Howl," the poem displays the irregular meter and structure that was to be a hallmark of Ginsberg's poetry. The poem is filled with cultural and political references as well as references to incidents and events in Ginsberg's own life as well as the lives of his friends and fellow Beat writers. Ginsberg used the "long line" as his creative foundation, experimenting and riffing on rhythm and meter in one long line that would be "all held together within the elastic of the breath...."

Ginsberg relates the poem to music, saying that the key to understanding the structure of the poem is "in the jazz choruses...." Sentences often run on without punctuation and the poem skips from subject to subject with little relation to each other. As in jazz, the point that Ginsberg hoped to get across was not narrative or beauty but spontaneity, human expression, and reaction. A persons emotion was to rise and build just as the long lines themselves built upon the emotion contained within.

The stanzas of the poem are also irregular and spontaneous. The first stanza is sixteen lines, the second and third both twelve, the fourth and fifth both ten. The final stanza is an amalgamation of rhythms and stream of consciousness writing. Ginsberg shifts in the poem from talking to America like a jilted friend or lover, to discovering that much of himself is America, and finally moving towards ridiculing and taunting this personified America for its militaristic culture, its vapid media, and its paranoid politics. Like other Ginsberg poems, the structure is really meant to be heard rather than read. In reading the poem aloud one better understands the conversational nature of the poem.

“America”, a poem based on political theory with resentment towards the Democratic way, is at the very least graphic and very opinionated towards the greater portrait of society. This is coupled with the author’s rebellious nature, his mother originating from Russian lands, and so a sense of heritage emerges in his persona, thus his views of a Socialistic society in United States were based off Russia’s Communism. The inquiries the author asks America as a whole helps to define his steadfast hold on his views, marking him as an extremist in that accord, but not in that the world was locked in a Cold war scare that helped reveal the true natures of each country involved.

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