Boy this is bad. I just read 'Howl.' Did people actually read it or did they just know the first line? It's crazy to look at these 'cultural touchstones' with the benefit of hindsight and see that it was always just horrible subversive crap that people pretended to like because they were told they were supposed to.
>>25602005Do you look at old paintings, seeing their strange and arbitrary shapes or figures, similarly concluding with your "benefit of hindsight" that they are "bad" and were liked only because people of the past were "told they were supposed to"? If you do I am indeed sorry for you, Mr Midwit.I pick the example only because most striking; times were different. In the arts this matters hugely.
>>25602015No. It's an impudent falsehood. Men did notInvariably think the newer way Prosaicmad, inelegant, or what not.Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blotUpon the church? Did anybody say Howmodern and how ugly? They did not.Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hotWith rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,Were these at first a horror? They were not.If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, foodAll set us hankering after yesterday,Need this be only an archaising mood?Why, any man whose purse has been let bloodBy sharpers, when he finds all drained awayMust compare how he stands with how he stood.If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitudeHas cost me a leg, must I forget straightwayAll that I can't do now, all that I could?So, when our guides unanimously decryThe backward glance, I think we can guess why.
>>25602027Yes, yes, CS Lewis, thank you for so gracing us.
>>25602005Howl is pretty good compared to the slop that passes for poetry nowadays (Billy Collins, etc). It's a pretty wild, spirited poem. I like the last section where it's very musical and he keeps repeating 'I'm with you in Rockland'. Whole section feels like a rock song before the Rock genre even existed.
>>25602005Dang why does he kinda look like this guy here?
>>25602005>screaming about how much you love moloch is a poem
Howl is actually a good poem. In fact, Ginsberg's only good poem.
>>25602046d-did he mean rockland country
>>25602077The fuck is rockland country? No, he meant some city near Chicago that had a mental institution housing some counterculture nobody.
>>25602005>when you romanticize the past so hard you start chiding people who actually lived through it for complaining
>>25602005The context was important of repressive 1950s Americana and the prevailing conformist attitude, safe and lacking any sort of edge or danger, safe to the point danger became attractive and thus the creation of the concept of the rebellious teenager archetype and so on. The beat generation emerged in tandem with this, and their writing style was influenced by trying to break away from conventions, experimentation, travelling the open road to find oneself, camaraderie in a small likeminded group of others who "get it" and are trying to escape their parents more rigid attitudes or the WASP heteronormativity. The writing wanted to follow a musical rhythm/jazz pattern in a languid freeform manner built on visceral raw expression, the sensation of spontaneous consciousness, motion. Ginsberg and others offered a sort of primal reaction, the repressed emerging in the surface, and that struck a chord with those going to university in the 60s, and then the threat of Vietnam on their livelihood with the draft looming. Your James Deans represented something that conventional middle-class existence seemed to exclude like spontaneity, intensity, sexual danger, emotional volatility, and freedom from ordinary social expectations, and Ginsberg and the Beats ran with that. The road represents an escape from settled existence, from the predetermined trajectory of degree, career, marriage, suburbia, appeasing mom and dad.The opening line"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness"establishes the poem's central moral proposition: the people the contemporary American society had discarded, disciplined, institutionalized, pathologized or condemned might actually be its most sensitive and spiritually vital members, and for this reason they were cast out due to not fitting the role or ideal prescribed for them.The poem then proceeds through an enormous accumulation of images involving drugs, sex, poverty, mental illness, religious ecstasy, urban alienation, and desperate attempts to transcend ordinary consciousness. What appears to a hostile reader as an indiscriminate celebration of degeneracy is from within the poem's worldview an attempt to reclaim the humanity and even sanctity of experiences that respectable society regarded as shameful. Redemption through sin. Where conventional society demands moderation and regulation inexpression, Howl insists upon intensity, pure feeling and exposure, abolition of any barriers or repression, and communicating that raw experience without boundaries. Ginsberg was gay, mentally ill, saw first hand the underbelly of the pristine American image and the myth for what it really was, and presented life that slipped through the cracks. Ginsberg was effectively arguing that the supposedly obscene aspects of human existence were inseparable from its spiritual and emotional reality and destroyed elitist standards of what should be considered appropriate subject matter for poetry or art at all.
>>25602005him and Sartre were my two favorite NAMBLA members desu his shorter work is tolerable. epitome of a whitman clone
>>25602065Basically this. It sounds like him whining that he can't molest boys and get buttfucked as much as he wants and what a soul crushing society this is>>25602122Not reading your AI shit. Make it three sentences and I will
>>25602027>Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot>Upon the church? Did anybody say How>modern and how ugly? They did not.Yes they did. The term 'Gothic' was meant as a pejorative.
>>25602362They used pointed arches before gothicAnd it was later Renaissance artists who meant the term pejoratively, because they were obsessed with Roman and Greek architecture
