Post Wwii Culture On The United States

Companies that were going bankrupt months before were now literally begging for labourers and some even suffered from a shortage of workers. This was mainly due to the rapid production levels the country needed to produce military equipment including ammunition and vehicles etc. A short time after the U.S. declaration of war, the unemployment rate dropped a massive ten per cent from its previous amount. After taxes, business profits almost doubled and industrial output increased massively at 96 per cent. Government expenditure also sored dramatically to 53 per cent of GDP at its peak in 1945, in comparison to around 20 per cent of GDP previous to the war. This contributed to business recovery and gave companies the kick start they needed. Due to productivity doubling, consumer goods also expanded. The war consumed one third of industrial output and this ensured a constant supply of goods, the U.S being the only country with a significant rise in supply despite rationing. Wages also rose 50 per cent higher by 1944, this was a combination of over-time pay and wage increases etc.

After the war, the American people made the change from "old" ways to "new" ways. Many factors, such as new technology, fundamentalism, new looks and church led to tension between the old and the new. The 1920s were a time of conflicting viewpoints between traditional behaviors and new and changing attitudes.

Allen Ginsberg’s revolutionary poem, Howl, is a powerful portrayal of life degraded. It represents the harsh life of the beat generation and chronicles the struggles of the repressed. Howl is a poem of destruction. Destruction of mind, body, and soul through the oppression of the individual. Using powerful diction, Allen Ginsberg describes this abolition of life and its implications through our human understanding of abstractions like Time, Eternity, and self. The poem’s jumbled phrasing and drastic emotion seems to correspond with the minds of the people it describes. Ginsberg uses surprisingly precise and purposeful writing to weave the complex

It was a 1951 TIME cover story, which dubbed the Beats a ‘Silent Generation, ’ that led to Allen Ginsberg’s retort in his poem ‘America,’ in which he vocalises a frustration at this loss of self- importance. The fifties Beat Generation, notably through Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as will here be discussed, fought to revitalise individuality and revolutionise their censored society which seemed to produce everything for the masses at the expense of the individual’s creative and intellectual potential. Indeed, as John Clellon Holmes once noted: “TIME magazine called them the Silent Generation, but this may have been because TIME was not

Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” was subjected to censorship trials shortly after its publishing. While Ginsberg himself was not charged, the trial was an attack of his work and morals as a beat poet and had the trial been successful, would have stifled Ginsberg’s platform. The trial transcript reveals that while “Howl” pushed the boundaries of American society, the work did not bear content to be legally defined as unfit for publishing, but fell victim to the conservative views of law enforcement officials (Morgan). “Howl” was prosecuted in 1957 for obscenity involving discussions of homosexual and heterosexual sex, illegal drugs, and other Beat topics. Lines such a “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy” were called out to be damaging to society (Ginsberg).

The form of Ginsberg’s poem challenges the American culture by resistance from “best minds”. Howl is separated to three sections that include long lines, which look like paragraphs. Resisting

Century apart, Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman share similar cultural, political and moral values, which they express in their literary work. Whitman’s writing is considered controversial for the eighteen hundreds. He sets the stage for generations to come breaking way from the strict Victorian poetic tradition by writing in free verse. Ginsberg follows his footsteps when composing his poem “Howl” by writing in long lines almost resembling prose and subdividing the poem into several parts. Likewise, he uses numerous repetitions to achieve rhythmicity of his verse. Ginsberg’s poem is heavily influenced by Whitman’s philosophy. The works “Song of myself” and “Howl” are similar in ideas, structure and underling themes. The two authors protest against old traditions imposed on the individual by corrupt society, stand against conformity and put emphasis on the need for change. They identify with their generation and dwell on themes such as sexuality, religion and the state of American society.

Ginsberg’s work often represents a struggle for spiritual survival in a dehumanized, repressive society. This can be seen in his writing of “Howl”:

The Beat Generation is a literary movement during the 1950s that consisted of male authors including the widely known Allen Ginsberg, who explored American culture in their poems. The Beat Generation could be described as misogynistic and patriarchal due to their exclusion of women and concerns confined to only male outcasts. In Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 “Howl”, he brings his audience’s attention to male outcasts in society. In her 2015 “Howl”, a critical response to Ginsberg’s “Howl”, Amy Newman explores the oppression outcasted women endure in a male-dominated culture through the allusions of an admired female poet, Ginsberg’s original stanza form, and utilizing diction to convey a woman's perspective antithetically to Allen Ginsberg's original.

Allen Ginsberg’s, “Howl” and T.S. Eliot’s, “The Waste Land” provide unique writing styles and are debatably the most influential poems in American literature. “Howell” was a poem that was able to influence a generation of poets. It gained great popularity when it was banned within the United States. Jonsson noted in her work that “Ginsberg’s colleague Lawrence Ferlinghetti ran a small publishing company, City Lights Publishing, and he had HOWL printed in England. When the novel was taken into America, it caused big problems. The entire edition was confiscated with the motivation that the novel was “obscene…” (Jonsson, 5-6). This banning of Ginsberg’s poem resulted in creating a platform for the author to illustrate his unique style of writing

Howl, by Allen Ginsberg, is an inaccessible writing with such obscure references from a unique personal life and small subculture from 50 years ago that it cannot stand on its own today. It tackles issues society has already decided, makes them completely unrelatable, and attempts to shock readers. Except to literary historians, this poem is irrelevant to modern society because of constant references to obscure places and people, frequent vulgarity to which internet-based society has been desensitized, and societal issues that already have national-level attention.

Poet Allen Ginsberg composed "Howl" in 1955 and it was published by City Lights Books of San Francisco, CA the following year. He composed the poem in the middle of the 1950s, one of the greatest decades in history for mainstream America. It had been a decade since the American and Allied victory in the second world war. Numerous American men returned home to a country in much better shape than expected, with many women having entered the workforce to keep the economy and industry alive in their absence. The spoils of war were great and America saw a great era of prosperity and domestic, suburban bliss. More interstate highways were constructed. Many more cars were produced and bought. It was a classic era for mainstream American culture in the 1950s. Yet in the haze of the suburbs, expansion of television, growth of Hollywood, and cars, present here were the seeds of rebellion and counterculture that was more indicative of the following decade, 1960s. One such seed is the poem

There are many similarities between Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Ginsberg’s “Howl”. Whitman’s influence can be noticed in Ginsberg’s work which range from a similar style of format, structure, a concern with the general population of America, and the impact that these two great writers had on the rest of the literary world. Another significant influence that Whitman has for Ginsberg is the fact that Whitman had been considered an outcast from the literary world of his era. Whitman appeared as a plainly dressed working man rather than a fancy high societal poet. His long winded style, free verse, and sexual exposure made Whitman stand out from the rest of the other poets. Ginsberg was also not accepted among the poets of his generation. His literary works were banned from the public’s eye. Another similarity was between the two was their subject matter. In the introduction of leaves of grass, Malcolm Cowley said, “Its subject is a state of illumination induced by two (or three) separate moments of ecstasy”.

He writes how, though talking of sexual independence, Ginsberg and his characters in Howl are basically “conformists”. Talking about how the marginalized/homosexual discourse gets absorbed into the mainstream heteronormative, Selby’s stand on Howl is that “however rebellious” the rebel heroes of Ginsberg’s poem are, they are rebellious in “a very traditional way” (65). He talks about how sexuality emerges as the new “commodity” for the heteronormative Capitalist America, drawing from Stephen Heath’s idea of the “Sexual Fix”, and also how the “gay heroes of Ginsberg’s text are being absorbed into the popular heroism of straight America”(64). Selby also provides the Obscenity Trials (1957) of Howlas a proof of “the process of assimilation of the marginal culture into and by the mainstream”, where the “rebel poet is redeemed as popular hero” (67). He emphasizes how a legal justification for his “dissident” work places Ginsberg into the discourses of the mainstream rather than at its margins and thus concluding off that “Ginsberg’s much vaunted rebellious sexual heroism, of which Whitman is the model, is not a liberation but a myth” (69, emphasis mine).

There is a stereotype that the best minds of a generation are the heroes of their generations, making new discoveries that can alter the course of history. While this holds true most of the time, Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl” offers a different perspective. In “Howl,” Ginsberg chronicles the chaotic lives of the “best minds of [his] generation,” using graphic language that eventually landed the publishers of the poem in court for a lawsuit, which was documented in the 2010 film Howl. Howl suggests that education and intellect provides the ability to persevere through madness as well as the ability to exhibit resistance to the self-destruction that madness has the potential to invoke. The poem effectively communicates this message through its repeated refrains, juxtaposition, and allusion. The theme of perseverance through madness is more prominent in the poem than in the film, yet it can still be recognized with close attention. The movie also serves as a solid resource in understanding the context of the poem within Ginsberg’s own life.