The Politics of Twentieth Century Poetry: Amiri Baraka versus Allen Ginsberg

The poetry of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Allen Ginsberg are example of how serious literary works can be used as a vehicle of social change. Both poets wrote during tumultuous times in American history. Ginsberg is primarily associated with the Beat movement of American poetry, in which poets used sprawling, freeform verse to criticize American capitalism and American values. Baraka is associated with the American Civil Rights movement, particularly with its most radical branches, which emphasized an eviscerating critique of racial relations in a society which claimed to support equality. Both poets made frequent use of literary allusions and derived new and innovative structures for their poems, rather than relied upon past conventions. But Ginsberg was more apt to favor more ironic and satiric tones in his poetry, versus Baraka’s frequently foul-mouthed, angry takedowns of white privilege from a heterosexual, male perspective.

In his 1969 poem entitled “Babylon Revisited,” Baraka deliberately invokes the image of the Whore of Babylon, a Biblical allusion, and fuses that image with an image of the United States. The title is also derived from the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited.” Baraka envisions a bestial creature slinking from Europe to America, a “gaunt thing/with no organs” (Baraka 1-2). America is envisioned as bankrupt of all morals, a place which creates an environment where African-American men will inevitably sink into poverty and drug addiction. Babylon, called the “great witch of euro-american legend” is said to have “sucked the life/from some unknown nigger/whose name will be known/ but whose substance will not ever” (Baraka 14-17) In other words, the intelligence and self-possession of black men are taken away from them by the American Babylon monster, leaving the dead man, “in a pile of dopeskin” (Baraka 19). The social mobility of America is mocked, rather all America does, Baraka suggests, is destroy America’s black youth.

Baraka’s poetry is also explicitly sexualized in his condemnation of the treatment of black men in America. American Babylon, after all, is explicitly envisioned as a woman, not as a man, and Baraka’s concerns are primarily about the emasculation and dispossession of men. “This bitch killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson /a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced/to a pitiful imitation faggot,” writes Baraka (Baraka 20-23). Baraka’s harsh use of slurs for both gays and African-Americans are used to drive his point home. His stress upon naming also seems particularly pointed, given that Baraka renamed himself with an African rather than a slave name, like many black Muslims, and the poem itself is a renaming of America as Babylon, rather than a place that is the home of the free.

Baraka’s male sexuality is also referred to in his violent image of America, who is said to be so diseased (presumably with venereal disease) that she has sores on her insides but cannot give birth, and numerous plays upon the word “pus” and “pussy.” These refer to disease and to the female organ that is said to have destroyed...

Baraka does not discuss black women and how they stand in relationship to the so-called whore that is America.
The openly gay Ginsberg, in contrast, celebrates his connection with previous poets like Walt Whitman who were openly gay and defied conventional constructs of masculinity. In one of his most famous poems, “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg uses the banal location of a commercialized, sterile supermarket to imagine the poet who had such an earthy and promising view of America a hundred years ago. “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,” writes Ginsberg, suggesting that Whitman could hardly believe what he was seeing as he wandered the aisles (Ginsberg 1). Whitman strolls among the sea of bounty in the supermarket, gazing at its different wares, rhapsodizing about America in the same way he did in his own poetry during the nineteenth century, but, in Ginsberg’s fashion, in a far more ironic way that ultimately emerges as more of a critique of American society than a celebration.

Ginsberg paints a vivid picture of the supermarket using poetry, much as Whitman might have done, establishing his continuity as a poet of America in the tradition of Whitman and much as Baraka sought to affirm his status as a kind of a Biblical prophet in the midst of Babylon. “What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! (Whitman 6-9). The references to husbands suggests Whitman’s desire for men and his wandering eye, even while creating a surreal image of human beings almost literally melding with the gaudy vegetables.

As well as an invocation of Whitman, there is clearly a critique of American excess in regards to the food Ginsberg sees in his hunger. Ginsberg the poet suggests that he and Whitman are hungering for something more, something that is simultaneously sexual and spiritual, while the other, conventional suburban shoppers are confused that such hungers are merely connected to physical hungers. Rather than using direct, confrontational language like Baraka, the images have greater beauty and humor in Whitman’s poem and are more subtle and open to multiple interpretations. Although his words may be ironic, Ginsberg still acknowledges the beauty of the bounteous vegetables.

Ginsberg, in contrast to Baraka’s aggressive affirmation of masculinity, also constantly references Whitman’s sexuality and other gay poets. “..and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” (Ginsberg 9). For Ginsberg, questioning American values is not expressed in racial terms in the poem, but rather in questioning conventional masculinity, which is something that Baraka, for all of his anger against America, does not really do throughout his work. “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, / poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. / I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork/chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?” (12-14). Whitman’s attitude…