1. Modernism, “The Waste Land,” and “Howl”
“Poetry is news which stays news.” –Ezra Pound
1. Modernism
Eric Kaufmann on modernism: ‘‘a great secular movement of cultural individualism which swept high art and culture after 1880 and percolated down the social scale to liberalize attitudes in the 1960s”

2. Contrastive juxtaposition vs. logical linkage
“high” formalism and “low” popular content interaction
alogical free association
Psychological realism: into another’s mind

3. 2. T.S. Eliot and “The Waste Land”
Born 1888, in St. Louis, U.S.A.; died, 1965, in London; studied at Harvard and Oxford; won Nobel Prize in 1948

4. Like cities: fragmented, disorienting, various dictions, noises, and tones
Collage, juxtaposition
“Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”

5. 3. Allen Ginsberg and “Howl”
“At 14 I was an introvert, an atheist, a communist, and a Jew, and I still wanted to be president of the United States.”

6. Ginsberg: born, 1926, in New Jersey, U.S.A.;
died, 1997, New York City; studied at Columbia
University

7. Became friends with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in New York

8. Atomic bomb, communism , Soviet Union worries in the U.S.

9. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (conformity)

10. Romanticized lawlessness

11. New York State Psychiatric Institute: Carl Solomon

12. October, 1955: reads part of “Howl” in San Francisco
Part 1: capitalism represses the visionary impulse
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, ”
“the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,”
Part 2: Moloch, a modern industrial state’s oppressiveness
“Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and creak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!”

13. Part 3: Carl Solomon, archetype of suffering
“I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs
all night and won’t let us sleep”

14. 4 . Similarities after major wars
both captured a mood: alienation; rebelling against conformity
innovative, liberating techniques
long lives
outriders: parallel to the mainstream culture

15. “in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night”