American poetry of the second half of the XXth century

The Beat Poets

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical
naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
dynamo in the machinery of night...

Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

Born in 1919

Ferlinghetti was born of an Italian-Portuguese immigrant family in Yonkers, New York. He attended the Mount Hermon School, then - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During World War II he lived in Europe and had some connection with the Free French Resistance and the Norwegian Underground. He was also sent to Nagasaki shortly after it was bombed. After the war he got a master's degree from Columbia University and wrote a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne about modern trends in poetry. In 1951 he went to San Francisco and got associated with the California Beat movement. Between 1951 and 1953 he taught French, wrote literary criticism, and painted. In 1955 he founded a little publishing house “The City Lights”, in which he published the books of the Beatniks - Ferlinghetti himself, Allen Ginsberg’s and others.

His own work differs from that of the other Beatniks. In the main it is poetry of protest against the existing order of things written with pungent[11] irony and sharpness. His volumes of verses are “Pictures of the Gone World” (1955), “Starting from San Francisco” (1961). “Her” (1960) is a novel about an artist’s search for the ideal in the guise of woman. Ferlinghetti's best-known collection of poetry is “A Coney Island of the Mind” (1958), which has been translated into nine languages.

In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in his honor. In 1998 he was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco. In addition to writing and publishing poetry and running the bookstore, Ferlinghetti continues to paint, and his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums. In 2000, he received the lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. Currently, Ferlinghetti writes a weekly column for the “San Francisco Chronicle”. He also continues to operate the City Lights bookstore, and he travels frequently to participate in literary conferences and poetry readings.

ALLEN GINSBERG

1926-1997

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. His father was a lyric poet and his mother was a high school teacher. As a teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to “The New York Times” about political issues such as World War II and workers' rights.

In 1943 Ginsberg graduated from High School in Paterson and in 1948 graduated from Columbia College in New York. Ginsberg has tried many professions - dish washer, book reviewer, sailor. He has visited many countries. In 1965 Ginsberg was deported from Cuba for publically protesting against Cuba's anti-marijuana stand. The Cubans sent him to Czechoslovakia, where one week after being named the King of a May Day parade, Ginsberg was labeled an "immoral menace[12]" by the Czech government and deported.

As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom later became leading figures of the Beat movement. In 1954, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco.

Allen Ginsberg is an original, extremely gifted poet, though often deliberately chaotic in his writing. After publication of “Howl” (1956) he was identified with the Beat movement and became the recognized “prophet” of the Beatniks. Ginsberg has contributed new themes and images to poetry. His work is characterized by a passionately negative and deprecatory view of modern corruption, mysticism and romantic guest for experience, the celebration of intimate biographical detail. He produced several volumes of verse: “Empty Mirror” (1961), “Reality Sandwiches” (1963) and some others.

Later in his life, Ginsberg formed a bridge between the Beat movement of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, befriending, among others, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, and Bob Dylan.In the 1960s and '70s, Ginsberg studied under gurus and Zen masters.

Ginsberg won the National Book Award for his book "The Fall of America." In his later years he became a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College. In 1993, the French Minister of Culture awarded him with the Order of Arts and Letters. He died in 1997 in New York City.

Read the following quotations and comment on each of them:

• "Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."
• "Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."
• "The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does."
• "First thought, best thought." (referring to his, and other Beat writers' unique style of writing poetry)

Ginsberg is best known for “Howl” (1956), a long poem about consumer society's negative human values. It overcame censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages.

Ginsberg's "Howl" is well-known to many for its opening line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness". It was considered scandalous at the time of publication due to the rawness of the language. Shortly after its 1956 publication by San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity[13]. Ginsberg's generally anti-establishment politics attracted the attention of the FBI, who regarded Ginsberg as a major security threat.

“HOWL” is the outcry of the postwar youth, their protest against the American way of life, the society driving the young people to despair and utter despondency. The poem consists of 3 parts. The first part depicts the spiritual and moral degradation of the youngsters. Part I is the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz musicians, drug addicts and psychiatric patients whom he encountered in the late 1940s and early 50s.

The second part focuses Moloch (the ancient Semitic god of the sun, fire and war to whom children were sacrificed) as the incarnation of capitalist America. Ginsberg intends that the characters he portrays in Part I were sacrificed to it.

The third is a message to a patient of a lunatic asylum whom Ginsberg met when briefly institutionalized in Rockland, a New York psychiatric hospital. This section is notable for its refrain, "I'm with you in Rockland," and represents something of a turning point away from the grim tone of the "Moloch" section.

The frequently quoted (and often parodied) opening lines set the theme and rhythm for the majority of the poem:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.

Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or "I." This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman. Lowell's book “Life Studies” was a highly personal account of his life and familial ties, and had a significant impact on American poetry. Plath and Sexton were both students of Lowell and noted that his work influenced their own writing.

The confessional poets were not simply recording their emotions on paper; craft and construction were extremely important to their work.

The confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s pioneered a type of writing that forever changed the landscape of American poetry. The tradition of confessional poetry has been a major influence on generations of writers and continues to this day.

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