Irwin Allen Ginsberg (*1926 in Newark, New Jersey, †1997 in New York City) was arguably one of the most prolific and celebrated American poets and public figures of the latter half of the 20th century, spearheading the transition from literary modernism to postmodernism. His career spanned more than fifty years—beginning in the mid–late 1940s and ending with his death just before the new millennium. Over the course of half a century, he published an extensive catalogue of poetry (collected in more than ten volumes) as well as numerous volumes of journals, interviews, essays and letters. He first became famous as a core member and leading proponent of the Beat Generation, a literary movement that evolved out of his friendship with fellow writers Jack Kerouac and William Seward Burroughs in New York in the late 1940s. Its main epicenter, however, was San Francisco during the mid-late 1950s and early 1960s.1 It was defined by its opposition to the mainstream American cultural values of the Cold War Era, its espousal of a spontaneous, uninhibited authentic expression of individual selfhood and experience as a reaction against conformism, and its direct concern with religion (Kruger, “Confessing out the Soul” 26ff.). Ginsberg’s status within the literary canon, like that of most other Beat writers, is hotly debated, and the discussion of his work is often limited to a narrow selection of famous and canonical poems—most prominently “Howl”. At the same time, his power in shaping the cultural landscape of postwar America, and in influencing the political and religious orientation of the nation, particularly its politically left-leaning youth, cannot be denied. Indeed, the very premise of changing America, of serving both as an example for his nation and a harbinger of its future, has proved instrumental to the role Ginsberg continuously ascribed to himself, and countless scholars have attributed this role to his profound influence on the literary and cultural scene in the second half of the twentieth century.
The role I am referring to, and whose intricacies I will set out to define over the course of this book, is that of the prophet—or more precisely, the prophet-poet. Not only did the poet himself view the two spheres of art and religion, or (his) poetry and prophecy, as inextricably connected, but in taking him by his word, academic scholars and critics have elevated the label of prophecy into a widespread theme that arguably permeates the discourse on his work, life and self-depiction. At the same time, the notion of prophecy often tends to be applied as a rather vague marker of poetic value instead of providing a clear-cut description of a particular philosophy of literature. In fact, the hagiographic nature of many scholarly treatments of the poet’s work only amplifies this tendency towards terminological simplification. Meanwhile, more critical examinations often deny this perceived mark of value to his work entirely, thereby equally failing to grasp the term’s inherent subjectivity and complexity. The usefulness of accessing Ginsberg via prophecy, prophethood and the prophetic, then, may seem to be simplistic to the point of becoming cliché or entirely devoid of meaning. Additionally, most critics tend to assume a stable and definitive meaning of the word “prophecy” and apply it to a few canonical works with limited outlook or forego a definition entirely and assume it to be self-explanatory. Yet several scholars warn against such homogenizing narratives, espousing a more nuanced approach.2 In contrast to the widespread trend of oversimplification common in the existing scholarship on Ginsberg, this book sets out to construct a new and flexible interpretive framework which theorizes Ginsberg’s own perspective and contextualizes the poet’s self-depiction and relationship to the experience of the prophetic within and beyond his own time. At no point does it seek to imply that all, or even a great majority of Ginsberg’s work can be defined as prophetic or was written with such a paradigm in mind—nor that prophecy may function as an objective theoretical model. Instead, it attempts to view prophecy from an angle close to Ginsberg’s own—to carve out major key components of his understanding and application of prophecy onto his literary productions, to show where and how this understanding is intrinsically limited and how its limitations manifest themselves in inherent tensions or paradoxes in his works over fifty years. I thereby wish to highlight how the poet’s works constantly revolve around and reconfigure this highly ambiguous concept.
In doing so, the hybridity of the label “prophet-poet” must be emphasized—while prophecy and poetry are close for Ginsberg in meaning, they are not (or at least not always) synonymous. On the one hand, there is poetry that is not prophetic, either because it does not follow a prophetic premise in the first place (or actively moves against it) or because it is deemed to be unsuccessful in doing so. On the other hand, the poet also deemed it possible for prophecy to be expressed via other media, such as music or painting, and attempted to translate some of their respective techniques into poetry (<?>). Throughout my analysis, the relation between poetry and prophecy will be discussed at selected points where the poet defined them against each other—such as in his explanation of the composition process of “Kaddish”, where prophecy is clearly seen as elevated above poetry (<?>)—or in congruence with each other, as in his description of the American poetic tradition in a 1968 interview (347). While most critics opt for the label “poet-prophet”, I will use the term “prophet-poet”, thereby emphasizing the primacy of Ginsberg-as-poet over Ginsberg-as-prophet. Prophecy, thus, can be seen as an attribute or subset of poetry, a specific mode within the wider realm of artistic choices and positions.3 Moreover, most critics have approached this aspect of Ginsberg’s self-depiction from a primarily literary angle while the methodology chosen for the present book explicitly relies upon a combination of disciplines and their respective tools.
While these three authors have been widely framed as the movement’s core members, it came to include other writers such as Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Philipp Whalen, Bob Kaufman, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger and Diane di Prima.
For instance, Sascha Pöhlmann suggests avoiding “developing sweeping theoretical models for […] what at any given point might be constituted as particular radical traditions in the United States, for the centers of these traditions do not hold” (Hutchinson qtd. on 18; my emphasis). Similarly, Amy Hungerford systematically dismantles numerous scholarly premises of understanding Ginsberg’s poetry to criticize the “tendency to read Ginsberg’s work as expressing one essential outlook” (152).
While I am applying it primarily to Ginsberg in this book, I also refer to other writers as prophet-poets—primarily Ginsberg’s (Romantic) literary idols, who are discussed in other scholarly works under the notion of prophecy, thus warranting an application of my own label.