Word: ginsberg
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...sense; in thrill, not mere experience. Beauty is physical, and they think the world owes them a living—a free beer, a pat on the back, easy sex, and a wad of twenty-dollar bills. Responsibility has too many syllables and love is a dirty word. Ginsberg makes a disappointing Rimbaud...
Like Holderlin, Blake, Baudelaire, or Rimbaud, the Beat poets are expatriates in contemporary society. They come to San Francisco, writes Rexroth, “for the same reason so many Hungarians have been going to Austria recently.” To Ginsberg, America is Moloch (the semiotic god whose worship entailed human sacrifice, usually of the first-born); and the great minds of Ginsberg’s generation, kicked around by the machine age, looking for “jazz or sex or soup,” are sacrificed to the great American dynamo...
...Beat poets abandon the intellect. To the Harvard community, schooled as we are in the academy of form, all poetry seems back which lacks order. Playboy, Esquire, and Harper’s are effectively snide in calling Kerouac and Ginsberg “immature.” Indeed they are; but, in the same sense, American poetry (outside of S.F.) appears to be senile—the aridity of a sterile Greenwich Village, or the ingrown complexity of form without substance, of structure without inspiration, which characterizes the overwhelmingly academic literature of America’s intelligentsia...
...Moloch!” cries Ginsberg. “Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! monstrous bombs!” A sphinx of cement and aluminum...
...Ginsberg in Howl is an animal Dmitri leaping headfirst into the pit of self-abasement. Sex, like dope, is jut a symbol. Masochism itself, a mean. Howl succumbs to now Hum 6 readings; it is like those poems we wrote for high school literary clubs, before we came to Harvard. But Ginsberg and his fellows mean it. And if IT means homosexuality, dope, jazz, or death—then these are the instruments...