Lee, Ben. “Howl” and Other Poems: Is There Old Left In These New Beats?. American Literature, 2004. 367-389
Ben Lee’s Is There Old Left In These New Beats applies the idea of gazing backward and thinking forward to stress Ginsberg’s longing for an “Old Left Past” as he writes of a new future. Lee explains that Ginsberg’s poems were notable for the influence they had on the past, not rather than “what they announced for the future.” Lee claims that certain aspects of “Howl” have been ignored. He tells readers that “Howl” is a prophecy of emergent movements in danger of being erased by traditional poetry, which will ultimately limit the possibilities of the future.
Lee says that “Howl” and other Beat-era poems have their own identifying style, attraction, and agency, and will “commemorate the resources of the past, infuse them with the present, and reconfigure them in…historical circumstance”. Lee argues that Ginsberg’s poems generate rhetorical energy and become symbols of resistance against social controls of an advanced industrial society. They disrupt, riot, and invoke a movement in the public to erect a new future. Lee believes “Howl” exhibits a community that moves forward and looks backward, a slight flip of his earlier idea which thought forward and gazed backward. This new idea helps clarify the separation of U.S. culture in the 1950’s in that the culture was moving on but still clinging to its old ideas. At the time Ginsberg was experimenting with new things and discovering his sexuality but still longing for deviant sexualities to become acceptable throughout the U.S. Lee declares these elements of culture and society were reproduced in Ginsberg’s great poem, “Howl”.
Later in the text, Lee focuses on his own interpretation of “Howl’s” content. He says the poem is full of longings, longings for love, acceptance, and sexual relations, but mainly Ginsberg’s longing of public acknowledgment. Ginsberg wants people to see his, “God-like self” and his mastery of poetry. However, Lee does not think Ginsberg’s desire of acknowledgment is a bad trait; but rather it is beneficial. He states that with these longings comes a lost past. That is mourned because it cannot be recaptured, but celebrated because of what it continues to represent; freedom and the promise of being welcomed into an open-minded culture.
Lee believes “Howl” speaks for a, “generation doomed, exhausted, institutionalized,” yet nonetheless possessing a vision. He claims “Howl” displays Ginsberg’s best techniques and rhetoric, reproduced in a strange historical contradiction. In a time of repression and liberation, “Howl” gains momentum to recreate the U.S. culture into something more acceptable and uncensored. He argues the old forms are remade as they are outdated, and “Howl” is what remakes them. Lee ends the essay with, “If it is a postwar now that Ginsberg hopes to seize…then it is contemporary now that he urges us to seize as we read and remember his poems”.
Lee says that “Howl” and other Beat-era poems have their own identifying style, attraction, and agency, and will “commemorate the resources of the past, infuse them with the present, and reconfigure them in…historical circumstance”. Lee argues that Ginsberg’s poems generate rhetorical energy and become symbols of resistance against social controls of an advanced industrial society. They disrupt, riot, and invoke a movement in the public to erect a new future. Lee believes “Howl” exhibits a community that moves forward and looks backward, a slight flip of his earlier idea which thought forward and gazed backward. This new idea helps clarify the separation of U.S. culture in the 1950’s in that the culture was moving on but still clinging to its old ideas. At the time Ginsberg was experimenting with new things and discovering his sexuality but still longing for deviant sexualities to become acceptable throughout the U.S. Lee declares these elements of culture and society were reproduced in Ginsberg’s great poem, “Howl”.
Later in the text, Lee focuses on his own interpretation of “Howl’s” content. He says the poem is full of longings, longings for love, acceptance, and sexual relations, but mainly Ginsberg’s longing of public acknowledgment. Ginsberg wants people to see his, “God-like self” and his mastery of poetry. However, Lee does not think Ginsberg’s desire of acknowledgment is a bad trait; but rather it is beneficial. He states that with these longings comes a lost past. That is mourned because it cannot be recaptured, but celebrated because of what it continues to represent; freedom and the promise of being welcomed into an open-minded culture.
Lee believes “Howl” speaks for a, “generation doomed, exhausted, institutionalized,” yet nonetheless possessing a vision. He claims “Howl” displays Ginsberg’s best techniques and rhetoric, reproduced in a strange historical contradiction. In a time of repression and liberation, “Howl” gains momentum to recreate the U.S. culture into something more acceptable and uncensored. He argues the old forms are remade as they are outdated, and “Howl” is what remakes them. Lee ends the essay with, “If it is a postwar now that Ginsberg hopes to seize…then it is contemporary now that he urges us to seize as we read and remember his poems”.
written by Clayton Jannise