Baraka vs. Ginsberg: Politics in 20th-Century Poetry

Introduction: Poetry as Social Critique

The poetry of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Allen Ginsberg exemplifies how serious literary works can serve as vehicles of social change. Both poets wrote during tumultuous periods 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 a searching critique of racial relations in a society that claimed to support equality.

Both poets made frequent use of literary allusions and developed new, innovative structures for their poems rather than relying upon past conventions. Ginsberg, however, was more inclined to favor ironic and satiric tones, whereas Baraka more often delivered forceful, angry indictments of white privilege from a heterosexual, male perspective.

Baraka's Vision of American Babylon

In his 1969 poem "Babylon Revisited," Baraka deliberately invokes the image of the Whore of Babylon — a Biblical allusion — and fuses it with an image of the United States. The title is also drawn from the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story of the same name. Baraka envisions a bestial creature slinking from Europe to America, a "gaunt thing / with no organs" (Baraka 1–2). America is portrayed as morally bankrupt, a place that creates an environment in which 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 stripped away by the American Babylon monster, leaving the dead man "in a pile of dopeskin" (Baraka 19). The social mobility promised by America is mocked; all America does, Baraka suggests, is destroy its black youth.

Baraka's poetry is also explicitly sexualized in its condemnation of the treatment of black men in America. American Babylon is deliberately envisioned as a woman, and Baraka's concerns center on 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). His harsh use of slurs for both gay people and African-Americans is deployed to drive his point home. His emphasis on naming also seems particularly pointed, given that Baraka renamed himself with an African rather than a slave name — as many Black Muslims did — and the poem itself is a renaming of America as Babylon, rather than accepting the nation's self-image as the home of the free.

Baraka's imagery of male sexuality is further extended in his violent portrait of America, who is described as so diseased — presumably with venereal disease — that she has sores on her insides yet cannot give birth. He plays extensively on the words "pus" and "pussy," invoking both disease and the female body as forces said to have destroyed black manhood and drained men of their vital essence. Like Baraka's friend Thompson, those men must "feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your / hysterectic laughs" (Baraka 30–31). Notably, Baraka does not address black women or consider how they stand in relationship to the so-called whore that is America.

Ginsberg's Supermarket and the Ghost of Whitman

The openly gay Ginsberg, in contrast, celebrates his connection with earlier 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 setting of a commercialized, sterile supermarket to imagine the poet who had held such an earthy and promising vision of America a hundred years earlier. "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 supermarket's abundance, gazing at its different wares and rhapsodizing about America in the same way he did in his own nineteenth-century poetry — but, in Ginsberg's rendering, in a far more ironic register that ultimately functions more as social critique than as celebration.

Ginsberg paints a vivid picture of the supermarket through poetry, much as Whitman might have done, establishing his continuity as an American poet in the Whitman tradition, just as Baraka sought to affirm his status as a kind of 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!" (Ginsberg 6–9). The references to husbands hint at Whitman's desire for men and his wandering eye, even while creating a surreal image of human beings almost literally melding with gaudy vegetables.

Beyond the invocation of Whitman, there is clearly a critique of American excess embedded in the food Ginsberg observes in his hunger. Ginsberg suggests that he and Whitman are hungering for something more — something simultaneously sexual and spiritual — while the conventional suburban shoppers around them connect hunger only to physical appetite. Rather than using direct, confrontational language like Baraka, Ginsberg's images carry greater beauty and humor and remain more open to multiple interpretations. Although his tone is ironic, Ginsberg still acknowledges the beauty of the bountiful vegetables.

Conclusion: Presence, Detachment, and Poetic Voice

It is perhaps the contrast in the ways the poet-narrator is depicted that is the most distinctive difference between Baraka and Ginsberg. While Baraka is always a presence in his poems — regardless of whether they are highly politicized in their language or only subtly so — Ginsberg rarely refers to himself as an actual participant, only as an observer. Baraka, as a Black poet living in a racist America, sees himself as unable to detach from the events, emotions, and lives he describes. Ginsberg is always detached, never referring to himself or his friends, only to other poets, to nameless American shoppers with whom he has no personal connection, and to America itself as an abstraction.

This difference helps to explain the greater emotional intensity in Baraka's poems compared to those of Ginsberg the satirist. Both poets used verse as a powerful instrument of social critique, but where Baraka's anger is immersive and personal — rooted in race, identity, and embodied experience — Ginsberg's irony operates from a distance, relying on wit and metaphor to expose the contradictions of American life. Together, they represent two of the most potent and distinct political voices in twentieth-century American poetry.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "Babylon Revisited." Poetry Foundation. 1959. Web. 24 Mar 2018. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42559/babylon-revisited

Baraka, Amiri. "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note." Online Poems. 1969. Web. 24 Mar 2018.

Ginsberg, Allen. "Homework." Poets.org. 1980. Web. 24 Mar 2018. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49311/homework-56d22b44cb0bd

Ginsberg, Allen. "A Supermarket in California." Poets.org. 1957. Web. 24 Mar 2018. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/supermarket-california