Ginsberg's Inferno: Dante and "Howl"
2012; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoHowl (1956), most influential poem of last half century, is as densely allusive as The Waste Land and Ulysses. Allen Ginsberg's major influences--Christopher Smart, William Blake, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, as well as Comte de Lautreamont, Surrealists, Antonin Artaud and William Carlos Williams--are well known. Ginsberg did not mention Dante Aligheri in his extensive annotations for Barry Miles' scholarly edition of Howl (1986), so critics have not fully explored profound influence of Inferno. But in May 1948 Ginsberg, aged twenty-two and still undergraduate at Columbia, wrote Kerouac, I have been reading Dante, which have found very inspiring In The Generation, Bruce Cook wrote that author of Howl (like Dante) was an aggressive, savage young man ... a great hater. In Howl Ginsberg could exclaim, like Marlowe's Mephistopheles, Why this is Hell, nor am out of it. His telling phrase, the whole boatload and his repetition of illuminations allude to Rimbaud's wild and debauched Le Bateau ivre and Les Illuminations, and Howl portrays--with anguish, grief and rage--his own Dantean Saison en enfer. The structure of Howl roughly corresponds to that of The Divine Comedy. Section I, a long series of laments, beginning with pronoun who, about chastisements and tortures, and section II, a condemnation of materialistic and repressive society symbolized by Canaanite god Moloch, whose worshippers had to sacrifice their own children, are Ginsberg's Inferno. Moloch is his equivalent of Lucifer, whom Dante sees with Judas in lowest circle of Hell. Section III, Ginsberg's homage to catatonia, portrays his sympathetic identification with Carl Solomon, dedicatee of poem. Solomon, his fellow inmate at Columbia Psychiatric Institute in 1949, was recommitted to Rockland insane asylum in 1955 and is passing through Purgatorio. Section IV, Footnote to 'Howl,' also written in 1955, is a modern riff on sacred theme of holy living. Ginsberg begins his Paradiso with fifteen chants of Holy!, which echo Holy, holy, holy, is Lord of Hosts: whole earth is full of his glory in Isaiah 6:3. He then names everything in world that he incongruously considers sacred: all parts of body, friends, his mother, music, cityscape, places from Peoria to Paris, Arkansas to Tangiers, time, sea, desert, hallucinations, faith, mercy and charity. Both The Divine Comedy and Howl combine descriptions of harsh Old Testament punishment and pain with promise of New Testament salvation, and Ginsberg even quotes Christ's last words on Cross. He not only portrays dim burning fire and darkness, but also invokes angels and archangels, seraphim and saints, and many wounded, fallen souls striving for illumination and redemption. He mentions purgatory and paradise, and his thematic last line--Holy supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of soul!---echoes sacred sense of last line of Paradiso: l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle (the love that moves sun and other stars). Beat poetry alludes to jazz beat and beaten down condition of renegade, as well as to spiritual element that suggests beatific. Ginsberg subtly introduces his own version of Dante's unreal reality, timeless and otherworldly, with evocative phrases like the motionless world of between, Eternity outside of Time and incarnate gaps in & Space. He brilliantly portrays demonic New York subways: men chained themselves to subways, howled on their knees in and--in a phrase deleted from first line of section II-- Whose hand bashed out their brains on subway wheels. The subways symbolize shuddering black underground inferno--with its noise, stink, filth and rats--that winds around in Dantesque circles beneath urban deathscape. …
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