Howl and Other Poems : Is There Old Left in These New Beats?

As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

—Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

The job would be beyond my means, for the present, however there is always hope for the Future. . . . I am the Trotsky with no dogma in your party.

—Allen Ginsberg, Journals Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958

It is difficult to resist the pull of the future. It is difficult, to turn immediately to the case I will discuss in this essay, not to place Allen Ginsberg's poems of the 1950s within forward-moving, future-oriented cultural narratives. According to such narratives, Ginsberg's first published poems remain notable above all because of what they announced for the future, or to put it another way, because of the influence they had on what we now call the past. Literary historians often refer to Howl as the most important poem since The Waste Land, arguing that it helped free American poetry from New Critical hegemony by proclaiming loudly and abruptly that free verse, the personal, and the political belonged again in the poetic vernacular. Similarly, social histories of the 1960s often cite Howl (and the Beat movement more generally) as the most famous embodiment of a structure of feeling—youthful, dissatisfied, rebellious—that would soon coalesce into the explicitly political cultures and practices of the New Left. In such accounts, Ginsberg's poems earn their place of importance because of their undeniable connection to the emergent. These poems announce both a new American poetry and a number of overlapping new social movements—gay liberation and the antiwar movement, in particular—that gained momentum in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s.¹

Without denying the force of such narratives, I want to gaze backward as I think forward in this essay, emphasizing Ginsberg's longing for an Old Left past that seems as insistent in his early poems as do his dreams of new freedoms, present or future. Focusing on Ginsberg's first published volume, "Howl" and Other Poems (1956), I argue for a newly historicized and melancholic reading of a poet whose important but complicated position in U.S. literary and cultural history we have only just begun to understand, and whose nostalgic affinities for the prewar Left have been mostly ignored by scholars of Ginsberg and of postwar U.S. culture and by critics of postwar U.S. poetry.² From Wobblies to American Socialists, Young Socialists, Communists, Yiddish Communists, and Trotskyites, Ginsberg's work in the 1950s is shot through with references to political identities supposedly antiquated and actively discredited by intellectuals on both the Left and the Right during the Cold War moment.³ His hopes for the future, as my epigraphs suggest, are bound up in his capacity to call up past figures of freedom and resistance, who, like Trotsky, manage to signify revolutionary hope while refusing the (Stalinist) violence and discipline that had tainted revolution by the 1950s. To the extent that Ginsberg's great poems of the 1950s, Howl above all, are prophecies of emergent movements and collectivities, they are also elegies for cherished pasts at risk of receding irretrievably, of being inconspicuously transformed and finally erased by narratives of progress that manage—by dint of historical victories—to limit the possibilities of the future. Like Benjamin's image of the flowers of the past striving constantly to reorient themselves in relation to that sun which is rising in the sky of history, the flowers we find scattered throughout Ginsberg's "Howl" and Other Poems retain their own undeniable agency and attraction. We can only understand them as fully as Benjamin suggests we might, however, if we manage to read against the unidirectional, categorically progressive heliotropisms...