Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg

Abstract

����� ��� Of all the major poets writing outside of academia in the 1950s, Allen Ginsberg’s claims to be a legitimate inheritor of Modernist experimentation seem to have been taken the least seriously. In contrast, linking the Black Mountain School with Modernism is common; in Charles Olson’s case, his inclusion of historical material in his Maximus poems follows Pound’s famous definition of an epic as a “poem including history” (“Date Line” 86). Understandably, seen within the historical Beat context, Ginsberg’s quasi-religious relationship to William Blake and Walt Whitman has caused critics to characterize him as a neo-romantic—even confessional—poet; recent work by Tony Trigilio and Amy Hungerford documents the impact of his conversion to Buddhism on his poetics. Nevertheless, Ginsberg viewed himself as one of the true inheritors of Modernism, not only citing his personal contact with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound as evidence but also regarding his work as a continuation of the French avant-garde, especially the Surrealism of Antonin Artaud. Although previous critics have outlined Ginsberg’s links to Williams and Pound, few have delineated the development of those influences over the course of Ginsberg’s career, and fewer still have explored how Pound’s and Williams’s exploitation of techniques borrowed from the plastic arts provided Ginsberg with a new approach to his own poetry. Specifically, Ginsberg adopted Williams’s approach of observing the phenomenal world in order to identify the “true value” of each object (a technique Williams derived from Paul Cezanne) and combined it with Pound’s impressionistic mimesis of perception (evident in many poems in Lustra and in certain passages of The Cantos) to form what might be called a poetics of Modernist looking. Such Modernist looking describes the fundamental poetic act of employing visual perception to shift (or metamorphose) apprehension of the phenomenal world from the quotidian to the numinous, dramatizing what Mircea Eliade would term a metamorphosis from