Howl and Other Poems - Criticism

Criticism

In American Scream, Jonah Raskin explores Ginsberg's "conspiratorial" themes in Howl, suggesting that Ginsberg, more than any other 20th-Century American poet, used literature to vent his criticism of the American government's treatment of the people and the diabolic actions of the CIA during the Cold War. Ginsberg claimed that the CIA was partially responsible for his rejection by publishers, an accusation that Raskin suggests might have carried merit, even as there was no tangible evidence supporting the theory. Having discussed the issue with Ginsberg himself, Raskin writes:

Who were the CIA-sponsored intellectuals? I asked Ginsberg when we talked in Marin in 1985. Lionel Trilling, Norman Podhoretz, and Mary McCarthy, he replied. In his eyes they contributed to the unhealthy climate of the Cold War as much as the cultural commissars behind the Iron Curtain did.

David Bergman, in Camp Grounds describes Ginsberg as a poet who, while not addressing the need to support the homosexual community directly, used a "Comically carnivalesque" tone to paint a picture of the situation facing the homosexual in 20th-Century society. As the poet in "Supermarket in California" addresses the grocery boy by saying "Are you my Angel?", Bergman suggests that the questions are rhetorical and meant to point out the relationship between the poet and popular culture by using the market as a "symbol of petit bourgeois society".

Gary Snyder, who traveled with Ginsberg and was present during the first public readings of Howl, stated that the poem suffered from the fact that it was meant as a personal statement. In his letters, Snyder argued that the poem contained repetitions of familiar dualisms that were not present in other works by Ginsberg during the era. However, in an interview published February 12, 2008, Snyder discussed the beneficial aspects of the poem and its reflection of society as it appeared to both Ginsberg and the public: "He was already very much at home in the text, and it clearly spoke -- as everyone could see -- to the condition of the people".

Diana Trilling, literary critic and wife of Lionel Trilling,a professor who taught Ginsberg at Columbia, criticized Ginsberg along with his audience by suggesting that Howl and other Ginsberg works presented an immature view of the modern society. To Trilling, the audience and Ginsberg shared a relationship that had little to do with literature, and she writes that the "Shoddiness" of the poems attested to the fact that they were created to relate to cynical popular culture rather than provide an artistic statement. Along with others in the Beat generation, the popularity of Howl attracted criticism on the tone and style of the Beat poets. Norman Podhortz, in a 1958 article entitled "The Know-Nothing Bohemians", writes that "the plain truth is that the primitivism of the Beat Generation serves first of all as a cover for an anti-intellectualism so bitter that it makes the ordinary American's hatred of eggheads seem positively benign".