Allen Ginsberg

Alexandre Ferrere

Artifice

Visions, Symbols and Intertextuality: An Overview of William Blake's Influence on

Ginsberg recalled a particular event, which had a strong impact on his career and on his spiritual approach to life. In July 1948, that is to say eight years before the publication of Howl, Allen Ginsberg had a dynamic impression of unification and of human understanding through visions. He wrote in his journals:

[...] I realized that what I was seeing had been there all the timeindeed excited in me a recognition of that aspect of the imagination which is referred to as the eternallonger than my own life, extending beyond my life and my former consciousness. I was staring at no human objects except the tops of buildings and at nature. Of the human objects, I remember that I understood in this one glance, their utility and significance. 2 This experience of visionary awareness, which would evolve into a positive trauma, is linked to William Blake. Indeed, thanks to the precise readings lists

understood it in his own interpretation: He was the metaphorical "Sick Rose" 10 and he was "hearing the doom of the whole universe" and its "inevitable beauty". At last, the same day, he also identified with Lyca in William Blake's "The Little Girl Lost". 11 Simultaneously with his Blake visions, he heard what he called a voice "tender and beautifully... ancient", 12 that is to say Blake's voice in his room, while being illuminated alone physically. At that moment, the poet "saw into the depths of the universe" 13 . He described this spiritual event in "Psalm IV" 14 in 1960: And he would write about this event in many letters 15 and poems, like in "One Day", from his 1961 journals, 16 emphasizing one particular element which reveals his ambivalence and doubt between reality and imagination: Allen Ginsberg seemed to be afraid of his own visions, making them both tempting and scary at the same time. It also feels like he had to justify to himself his visions, maybe to avoid the threat of a psychological trouble like his mother had had. Indeed, in putting a certain contradiction into the poem, Allen Ginsberg reduced the blur between appearances and reality, between his inner illumination and the exterior world. Furthermore, there are clues about his fear of being considered crazy about his Blake visions. For example, Allen Ginsberg wrote a letter in 1962 to Nobel Prize Bertrand Russel about William Blake (Bertrand Russel having studied Blake too) and wrote more precisely about his visions. Interestingly, Bertrand Russel also experienced visions of William Blake, and Allen Ginsberg wrote about it at different moments in this letter:

What happened to you with Blake? Any further significance to the sensation that nearly made you faint? 17 […] Would Blake say that Tiger be scared by bomb? 18 [...] What does Blake say to you? 19 […] I hope you put your experience of Blake on verbal record in more detail, it may be helpful. 20 Those lines convey a fear of being abnormal. Allen Ginsberg is almost oppressive, asking many times about the effect the Blake visions had on Russell, as if to reassure himself with the desire of being normal ("helpful"), or at least reassured he was not the only one illuminated by Blake. And he also referred to the voice in his Blake visions three years later in "Kral Majales" ("[...] because I heard the voice of Blake in a vision, and repeat that voice." 21 ), going further in describing his literary aim regarding poetry and regarding those visions, twenty-five years after it occurred in his poem entitled "Who":

From Great Consciousness vision Harlem 1948 buildings standing in Eternity.

I realized entire Universe was manifestation of One mind -My teacher was William Blakemy life work Poesy, transmitting that spontaneous awareness to Mankind. 22 During the same month of his Blake visions, Allen Ginsberg also composed a poem entitled "On Reading William Blake's "The Sick Rose". 23 The mysterious poem of William Blake seems to refer to the human condition, poisoned by its own existence, like Albert Camus wrote in Le Mythe de Sisyphe: "le ver se trouve au coeur de l'homme". 24 This point is corroborated by an entry in Ginsberg's journals, in January 1949: Destiny itself is sick. The rose is sick. We must be doctors we are the sickness. 25 The definitive version of Allen Ginsberg's poem is also mysterious in its way: Just like Blake emphasized the importance of the "rose" with a capital "R", 26 Allen Ginsberg echoes to him with the accentuation of the capital "B" of "Blossom" (which is also a title of a poem of William Blake, "The Blossom"). Allen Ginsberg also chose to accentuate the word "Doom" too, making the idea of destruction as important as the idea of being born ("Blossom"), like the cycle of life. This particular spiritual link Allen Ginsberg maintained with Blake's poetry is confirmed by his numerous performances of Blake's poetry, like he did for "The Sick Rose". 27 His performance, with a harmonium, sounds like a mantra 28 recitation, 22 Ibid., p. 603. 23 Ibid., p. 14. 24 Camus, Albert. Le Mythe De Sisyphe: Essai Sur L'absurde. Paris: Gallimard, 1942, p. 17. 25 Ginsberg, Allen, Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton, and Bill Morgan. op. cit., p. 259. 26 Blake, William, and Geoffrey Keynes. Blake Complete Writings;with Variant Readings. London: Oxford UP, 1972, p. 213. 27 Ginsberg, Allen, perf. Holly Soul Jelly Roll. Allen Ginsberg. Rhino Entertainment Company, 1998. CD. It is interesting to notice that all the songs of the third CD begin with the expression "Ah!", as a nod to William Blake's poem "Ah! Sun-Flower". 28 Ginsberg, Allen, and Bill Morgan. Deliberate..., op. cit., p. 150. According to Allen Ginsberg, a mantra is "like a short magical formula prayer […] which is an appeal to an aspect of the self". a spiritual experiment that is to be connected with his own metaphysical experience of Blake's poetry. 29 As a major event, ten years after his imprinted visions, Allen Ginsberg still referred to it in his poetry like in "'Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square'"30 or in "Ignu". 31 Much later, in a 1975 course at the Narupa Institute, 32 he would remember his 1948 visions, with a more concrete and mature look on it:

When I was twenty, I had an auditory hallucination of Blake's voice, which was just about like that [he played a recording of himself singing Blake's "The Nurse's Song" before]. But it took me about twenty years to perfect it. So it was probably a hallucination of my own latent diaphragm vocalization. I was hearing my own voice, probably, as in a dream. This idea of hearing his own voice is supported by his mention of "a conception of a voice of rock" he had after his visions. [START_REF] Clark | [END_REF] In fact, he remembered having in mind this concept as a consequence of his Blake visions:

In 1948 I had a vision and heard William Blake's voice reciting […]. After that experience I imagined a "Voice of Rock" as the sound of prophesy. [START_REF] Ginsberg | [END_REF] This "voice of rock" is also recorded in his journals:

Reminiscent also my thought that the conception of a "Voice of Rock" of poetry, my preoccupation in 1949, had been embodied finally in the absolute literal voice in the poetry 1955. 35 In Jack Kerouac's On the Road, where Allen Ginsberg is named Carlo Marx, the author also related a "Voice of Rock" that Carlo was using, which underlines the fact that this voice was a major issue the poet must have talked about:

In these days Carlo had developed a tone of voice which he hoped sounded like what he called The Voice of Rock. [START_REF] Kerouac | Road Novels, 1957-1960[END_REF] Allen Ginsberg even composed a whole poem entitled "The Voice of Rock" 37 and wrote about it in his Indian Journals ("When I was young you came with the / voice of tender rock). 38 In the 1975 Naropa class mentioned above, he definitely accepted the place of Blake as his external mentor, who acted as his inner catalyst for mixing poetry and spirituality, but also as his inner mirror in which he could see what he really was, by the voice of himself/Blake. In 1966, he understood these visions in a more physiological way:

The interesting thing would be to know if certain combinations of words and rhythms actually had an electro-chemical reaction on the body, which could catalyze specific states of consciousness. I think that's what probably happened to me with Blake. 39 It is also interesting to notice that Ginsberg tried to obtain visionary hallucinations without Blake, which he mentioned in another poem, written in July 1948: "Vision 1948". 40 The line "Dance, dance, spirit, spirit, dance!" is directly connected to a declaration he made in an interview where he summoned his vision in dancing and yelling "Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance! Spirit! Spirit! Dance!". 41 He added that "he felt like Faust" and "got all scared and quit". The experimentation of a widened consciousness induced by self-provoked visions is negative without Blake. His Blake visions were always positive, as he recalled having another one in the same page, while reading Blake's "The Human Abstract". 42 In "The Sick Rose" or in "Ah! Sun-Flower", the reader has to decipher the metaphorical subject regarding its own condition; Ginsberg seems to be less evasive and gives advice, like in the last verse of "A Mad Gleam", written six months after the Blake visions: "Follow the flower to the ground". 43 The flower is obviously a reminiscence of "The Sick Rose" and of "Ah! Sun-Flower" (about which Allen Ginsberg and his father had discussions about its meaning 44 ). The latter also appears to be the main influence of a 1955 well-known poem of Allen Ginsberg: "Sunflower Sutra". 45 The mention of his Blake visions is very clear:

-I rushed up enchantedit was my first sunflower, memories of Blakemy visions -Harlem This sunflower now has a new meaning in Ginsberg's poem: like in Baudelaire's "Une Charogne", Ginsberg is able to see the beauty where there is only urban trash. He writes the 37 Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 18. 38 Ginsberg, Allen. Indian Journals: Notebooks Diary Blank Pages Writings March 1962[START_REF] Ginsberg | Indian Journals: Notebooks Diary Blank Pages Writings March[END_REF]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, p. 58. 39 Clark, Thomas, and Allen Ginsberg. op. cit., 30-31. 40 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p;16. 41 Clark,Thomas,and Allen Ginsberg. op. cit.,42. 42 Id. 43 Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 24. 44 Ginsberg,Allen,and Louis Ginsberg. op. cit.,p. 258. 45 Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 146-147. beauty out of the usual carcass, contrary to Blake's "The Sick Rose" in which the natural beauty is decaying. This poem is clearly a reminder of Blake's "The Echoing Green". In Ginsberg's poem, the poet and Jack Kerouac sit side by side, thinking "the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed […] tired and wily". 46 They both look at a scrap heap looking like a sunflower. To the poet, this event brings back memories of Blake as well as a nostalgic gaze on "artifacts passing into the past". 47 In Blake's poem, an old man remembers his past while looking at children under the sun arising and descending. In both poems, the sun is a triggering figure. It offers a contemplative lightning in Blake's poem and a nostalgic "dead gray shadow" 48 in Ginsberg's, like two sides of the same coin. The place of the sunflower is once more of importance when it becomes metaphysical in "Poem Rocket", 49 just after the mention of the "one fold universe where Whitman was and Blake and Shelley was [...]": 50 Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

Allen Ginsberg chose the selective article "the" and not "a". It can then be referring to a specific sunflower, maybe the one of Blake's "Ah! Sun-Flower": 51 Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun;

Seeking after that sweet golden clime, Where the traveller's journey is done;

The main difference is that while in Blake's poems wealth and human prosperity are noticed with a global and almost social prism, Allen Ginsberg's poetry appears more introspective and more metaphysical.

It also appears that William Blake had a deep impact on Allen Ginsberg regarding his use of symbols and metaphors. For example, in William Blake's poems "The Little Girl Lost" and in "The Little Girl Found", the little girl is lost in a desert but a lion tells the parents where she is. This poem could act as a good metaphor for Ginsberg's state of mind at that time who felt lost at one point ("after seven years […] I lost my curiosity. I lost my motive, my 46 Id. 47 Id. 48 Id. 49 Ibid., Ibid., p. 172. 51 Blake, William, and Geoffrey Keynes. op. cit., p. 215. reason." 52 ). But there is also a lion in Ginsberg's poem "The Lion for Real" 53 in which he is seen as mentally ill by everyone and the lion here is ambiguous: it is dangerous and scary but also incredible, endearing and illuminating. Published in 1958, a decade after his visions, Allen Ginsberg played with the reader, between an accepted surrealism and a metaphysical metaphor, as it appears through the poem:

He didn't eat me, tho I regretted him starving in my presence […] Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your

Hunger

The lion, and its opposite the lamb, have a specific meaning for Allen Ginsberg. In fact, as Jewish traditions require, Allen Ginsberg made a kaddish for his mother after she passed away. In this famous and melancholic poem, the "lion eats the souland the lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger". 54 But whereas according to Samuel Foster Damon in his Blake Dictionary [START_REF] Damon | A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake[END_REF] Blake's lion is a protective figure of the lamb, in Allen Ginsberg's specific and enthusiast reading, the figures of the lion and of the lamb are respectively the evil and the good, the strength and the weakness in us, the Blakean Urizenic reason and Los imagination in us, in an almost schizophrenic manner. Furthermore, the lamb is a Blakean and traditional figure of innocence, as well as a figure of forgiveness and compassion in "Auguries of Innocence":

The lamb misus'd breeds public strife, And yet forgives the butcher's knife. [START_REF] Blake | [END_REF] But Blake divided one characteristic into a subtle non-Manichean feature. For example, the lion is active and aggressive in "A Memorable Fancy" ("In a fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living fluids" 57 ), sometimes it represents a Christian figure of the wrath of God ("The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God" 58 ) but finally, as Samuel Foster Damon analyzed, it becomes a protective figure of the lamb, thus of innocence, in Heaven, 59 as if it were expressing remorse or looking for redemption: The lion is also represented in another of Allen Ginsberg's poems, "A Lion Met America", which is according to the poet "a little imitation of Stephen Crane's In the desert / I saw a creature, naked, bestial": 60 A Lion met America On the crossroads in the desert

Two figures

Stared at each other. 61 The lion is here like America: a symbol, a figure. But while America represents an ideal society, a Whitmanic America, the lion is more enigmatic. In fact, it seems that, just like in Blake's representations, the lion has more than one meaning:

The Lion bit the head off America And loped off to the golden hills That's all there is to say About America except That now she's Lionshit all over the desert. 62 The lion appears like a prey and a threat for America, as it violently attacked the figure of America, and damaged the desert. In fact, there is here a certain yearning for a returning to a pure land, to the wild landscapes. To a certain extent, William Blake also had this desire, writing "O Earth, O Earth, return!" in the beginning of "Songs of Experience". 63 This could explain why Allen Ginsberg wrote "America" and not "the United-States", as if to underline the original virginity of the land. 60 Ginsberg, Allen. Journals Mid-fifties..., op. cit., p. 438. 61 Ginsberg, Allen, and Rachel Zucker. Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems. Ed. Bill Morgan. UK: Penguin, 2016, p. 25. 62 Id. 63 Blake, William, and Geoffrey Keynes. op. cit., p. 210.

Another interesting point is that the national animal of England is a lion; metaphorically, this could mean that the pollution of the land of America is due to its invasion by foreign pioneers and their activities which took the "head off America", which reminds what he wrote about what England's nation represented for America's soil and population: Somebody lands and deceives the red man and steals his space to begin with. America never did belong to us. 64 Allen Ginsberg criticized men who are not really concerned by nature. He defended his point of view in a letter:

[…] each of us Americans pours more poison waste into fresh water and ocean than any thousand Asians. The world's ocean may be dead […] if we have not stopped our war on Mother Nature and our wars on our own human kind. 65 Nevertheless, there is another interpretation we can make of the figure of the lion in the poem above. If we take the figure of the lion according to William Blake's symbolism, the lion can be a symbol of a "spiritual wrath", 66 a form of trigger for a rebellion: all that is left in America is "Lionshit all over the desert" 67 (in his journals he wrote something quite similar: "America is covered with Lies" 68 ). This means that there are clues or hints of the lion's wrath, which can be a background for a spiritual change, to be finally aware of America as it is. In finding reasons and in building a little metaphoric story in this poem, Allen Ginsberg underlined that it is time to change, to be concerned again, to be fully aware of the environment's conditions, like he wrote in "Friday the Thirteenth":

What prayer restores freshness to eastern meadows, soil to cindered acres, hemlock to rusty hillside, […] Earth pollution identical with Mind pollution, consciousness Pollution identical with filthy sky. 69 In that sense, the Lion is a wrath that can evolve into a positive reaction, an opposite direction to follow, a counterattack.

On the other hand, the figure of the lamb represents, as evoked earlier, ideas like innocence, compassion, sensitivity and delicateness, as in Blake's poems "The Lamb" 70 ("He 64 Ginsberg, Allen. Composed on the Tongue. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1980, p. 134. 65 Ginsberg, Allen, and Bill Morgan. The Letters..., op. cit., p. 362. 66 Damon, S. Foster. op. cit., p. 242. 67 Ginsberg, Allen, and Rachel Zucker. op. cit., p. 25. 68 Ginsberg, Allen. Journals: Early..., op. cit., p. 112. 69 Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 546-547. 70 Blake, William, and Geoffrey Keynes. op. cit., p. 115. is meek, and He is mild") or "The Shepherd" 71 ("For he hears the lamb's innocent call"). In Ginsberg's writings, especially in "Howl", the figure of the lamb also represents the youth preyed on by Moloch, as he described in Deliberate Prose 72 : Part I, a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths; Part II names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb; Part III a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory;

The lambs are the "best minds" in Ginsberg's "Howl", very close to the figure of creation and imagination, destroyed by "mental consciousness", the reason. In "Howl", the figure of the lamb also represents the "middleclass" and the rebellious are therefore qualified as "crazy shepherds". 73 The middleclass is then the oppressed herd, waiting to follow someone. This reminds of his short essay on freedom in America entitled Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lambs. 74 In "Kaddish", Allen Ginsberg states that the lion is an incomprehensible and lingering pain that is being aggressively infringing ("eats") on his own human love and compassion ("the lamb"), reminding the First Noble Truth 75 as Ginsberg wrote, quoting Blake: "Man was made for joy and woe". 76 This parallelism between Blake and Buddhism is often pointed out by Ginsberg himself. He even offered thoughts on the influence of Buddhism on Blake, especially for the fact that Blake made Urizen the embodiment and personification of reason: Did Blake originate this brilliant idea? There may be ancient Buddhist correlatives. 77 It is also in "Kaddish" that the idea of being saved through imagination and poetry can be found. This idea is reflected in Blake's poetry in the conflict opposing Urizen, reason, and Los, imagination. Ginsberg observed that Urizen is according to Blake "unprolific" which he generalized in "he can't write poetry, he can't create anything, all he can do is criticize". 78 In "Kaddish", Ginsberg reminds his mother and uses his imagination to recreate his mother's 71 Ibid., p. 118. 72 Ginsberg, Allen, and Bill Morgan. Deliberate..., op. cit., p. 230. 73 Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit.,p. 142. "Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the / crazy shepherds of rebellion!" 74 Ginsberg,Allen,and Bill Morgan. Deliberate...,op. cit.,p. 3. 75 The Four Noble Truths are the four "steps" taught by the Buddha:

1. The truth of suffering 2. The truth of the origin of suffering 3. The truth of the cessation of suffering 4. The truth of the path to the cessation of suffering To see more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/buddhism/beliefs/fournobletruths_1.shtml#h2 76 Ginsberg,Allen,and Bill Morgan. Deliberate...,op. cit.,p. 158. 77 Ibid.,p. 283. 78 Ibid.,p. 282 childhood in detail and "get beyond appearances". 79 In this perspective, he is writing his mother back to life with the help of Los, saving her from Urizen and oblivion, and giving her an imaginary body and an eternal soul. The climax of the comparison between Blakean figures of Urizen (reason, "mental consciousness"), Los (imagination, creation) and Like Urizen "preyed" on Los, Moloch, "whose name is the Mind", 81 attacks the imagination of the lamb, of the American people. Like Allen Ginsberg stated, "the secrets of individual imagination […] are not for sale to this consciousness", a consciousness which is aggressively hitting the brains and by doing so destroying the other part of the self, the proper imagination, from "children" to "old men". 82 Concerning Urizen, there is in Ginsberg's personal journals a poem composed in 1949 untitled "Blake's Urizen", 83 written in the same way he wrote "On Reading William Blake's 'The Sick Rose'": 79 Id. 80 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 139. 81 Id. 82 Id. "Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!" 83 Ginsberg, Allen, Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton, and Bill Morgan. op. cit., p. 259.

The opening verses of the poem are taken from the second stanza of the sixth chapter of "Urizen", [START_REF] Blake | [END_REF] which shows how Ginsberg was steeped in Blake's mind. It is interesting to notice the association of "money" and "work" with "worry". This very idea is to be linked with Ginsberg's figure of Moloch, close to the figure of Urizen as we have seen. In this poem, Allen Ginsberg seemed "divided" between what he wanted to do and what he could do. This cyclical and permanent tension between reality and imagination, between inner feeling and external representation is to be sprinkled all over Ginsberg's poetry in his later poems. This impression is described in one of his 1948 letters (written in July, the same month his visions occurred): 85 I remember that a long time ago you asked me when I was going to produce a poem in extension of myself, a work of art not of will. I am beginning to discover that possibility now. I have a good deal to say on the subject, but I do not possess the freedom to expatiate with any degrees if sincerity and clarity. […] Still I have sufficient hintsalmost visions, or I am finally on the right road.

Concerning the poem "Howl" and Blakean mythology, Ginsberg added that verses like "Buildings are judgment" have to be in fact compared with Blake's figure of Urizen, "creator of spiritual disorder and political chaos". [START_REF] Ginsberg | Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, With Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts, and Bibliography[END_REF] Influenced both by the biblical tradition and the "cannibal dynamo" of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 87 the figure of Moloch itself is to be compared with Blake's Urizen according to James Breslin. [START_REF] Breslin | Allen Ginsberg's "Howl[END_REF] For that purpose, Allen Ginsberg even established and described parallels between the concept of Urizen (or as he would say "Your-Reason" [START_REF] Ginsberg | [END_REF] ) and his time. He explained:

It's very similar here in Urizen to the late 1970s problem the President had in deciding whether to employ the neutron bombwhether to push forward on the vast nuclear plain or to withdraw. 90 This "Urizenic mentality" 91 of modern times is both a re-contextualization and an actualization of Blake's idea of "hyper-rationalism" 92 expressed in the figure of Urizen. By doing so, Allen Ginsberg created a valuable space warp, a fatal wormhole between ancient prophecy and present time. In this approach of values by the prism of Blake, Allen Ginsberg is suggesting the importance of his lifelong model by the prophecy of the poet. Furthermore, in his annotated versions of "Howl", under the notes of his final draft, he put a quote from William Blake, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom", 93 which is significant regarding Ginsberg's major works, and his abundance of ideas. He also admitted and openly assumed the use of Blakean specific vocabulary. This is the case for the expression "Moloch whose poverty is specter of genius", in which "specter" have to be understood in Blake's sense, 94 that is to say the "reasoning power". 95 In that case the usual poverty of citizens is due to the toxic and poisonous cleverness of the modern society, making poverty a condition sine qua non to keep Moloch healthy, making the bareness of millions the sustainable food of a few. Once more the similarities between Urizen, who embodies the hyper-reason, and Moloch the pitiless industrial complex, are to be underlined.

Allen Ginsberg, as we have seen earlier, wrote to Bertrand Russell about their shared Blake visions. But Allen Ginsberg even put, once more, Blake's mythology into the real world of his time. The letter to Bertrand Russel was written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they also talked about the approaching war; so Allen Ginsberg wrote with a Blakean symbolism in order to speak a common language with Russell: Would Blake say that Tiger be scared by bomb? 96 Of course, the "Tiger" refers to Blake's poem "The Tyger". 97 According to Samuel Foster Damon in A Blake Dictionary, the tiger represents the wrath and "when the Wrath breaks forth, it is Revolution". 98 In fact, in another poem published posthumously entitled "For the Soul of the Planet is Wakening", Allen Ginsberg added: […]can steady our gaze into the fiery eyes of the tygers of the 93 Ginsberg,Allen. Howl: Original...,op. cit.,p. 146. 94 Ibid., p. 142. 95 Damon,S. Foster. op. cit.,p. 381. 96 Ginsberg,Allen,and Bill Morgan. The Letters...,op. cit.,p. 273. 97 Blake,William,and Geoffrey Keynes. op. cit.,p. 214. 98 Damon, S. Foster. op. cit., p. 413. figure of the lamb is on the one hand the concrete animal in the landscapes, and on the other hand a bucolic figure of a link between Men and Nature. This is why in both poems Allen Ginsberg heard the "sounds of Aleph and Aum". 111 Aleph is the first letter of the Hebraic alphabet and Aum the primordial sound in religions like Buddhism. This means that Allen Ginsberg, in the company of William Blake, experienced a feeling of unity with earth and nature. Moreover, in both poems, Allen Ginsberg wrote about the lambs in the fields of Wales. This sounds like a nod to William Blake's "Jerusalem": The first verse refers to a Blake's panting entitled The Dance of Albion (or Glad Day) and in Blake's poems, one of Albion's daughters, Gwendolen, "dances naked to the timbrel of war". 114 But Allen Ginsberg created a new version of the children of Albion for the children also refer to the youth of England. The Blakean symbol of Albion is consciously chosen by Allen Ginsberg, for the inscription of the Blake's painting reads: which is also known as "the Rock of Albion", 117 where "Jesus lays the sleeping Albion". 118 This rock seems to symbolize the new birth of a complete Man. The "satanic mills" Allen Ginsberg referred to are also the "Satanic Mills" of William Blake's "Jerusalem":

And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills? 119 Once contextualized in the modern era, the references Allen Ginsberg made to William Blake are significant: youth is the new hope, Blake's ideal born again. This is maybe why Allen Ginsberg wrote at the end of the poem:

The Circle is Complete. 120 The circle is returning to the beginning, from Blake's poetry in the England of the eighteenth century to Ginsberg's nod of 1965. The poem is therefore pointing in the past, to finally come back toward a new era and a new world, one more time.

William Blake had such a deep impact on Allen Ginsberg that he also used a quote from William Blake's poem "Morning" 121 as a title for his own poetry collection, Gates of Wrath. 122 He also used the first stanza of "Morning" as an epigraph for the same book. In fact, in many poems and interviews William Blake appears as a poet Allen Ginsberg paid tribute to, as a poet who had always haunted Allen Ginsberg's poetry. For example, in the poem "May Days 1988", a nostalgic and melancholic description of a normal day, Blake's "Tyger" appears in a bookcase, 123 as to show the habit of having William Blake in his everyday life. Allen Ginsberg later wrote in "After Lalon":

When I was young Blake tipped me off Other teachers followed:

Better prepare for death Don't get entangled with 117 Damon,S. Foster. op. cit.,p. 350. 118 Id. 119 Blake, William, and Geoffrey Keynes. op. cit., p. 481. 120 Ginsberg,Allen,and Rachel Zucker. op. cit.,p. 51. 121 Blake,William,and Geoffrey Keynes. op. cit.,p. 421. 122 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 809. 123 Ibid., p. 980. possessions 124 In this extract, William Blake officiates as one of Allen Ginsberg's teachers. One could have thought that William Blake only influenced Allen Ginsberg's poetry, but Blake (among others including Walt Whitman, or William Carlos Williams) is a kind of metaphysical teacher who goes beyond teaching sheer poetry. The poetry of Blake transcends time and space, offers a new mythology and a new consciousness of the universe. This point is a central notion in Ginsberg's poetry; the echo he found in Blake influenced his poetical commitment but also his perception of poetry. He said in a 1966 interview that with Blake he understood "that poetry had a definite effect, it wasn't just pretty"125 and that it was in a way a "time machine". 126 In a 1949 letter to John Clellon Holmes (author of Go), he added:

[…] the more literal the mind […] the more prophetic it will be. I was surprised when I realized that Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dante, etc. were in greater or lesser senses literal. Who takes them literally? Who takes the core of the Bible literally? Who even takes Freud literally? Who takes the world literally? 127 In this passage, he underlined the concrete substance of poetry, that it has to be confronted to reality. Therefore, he admits that he read Blake almost religiously, like a text showing the path. In a way, Allen Ginsberg practiced hermeneutics on Blake, trying to find tangible applications to his poetry while at the same time being influenced by it. He also clearly admits his devotion to poetry and Blake as his main influence many times. Furthermore, the perception of the uniqueness of the universe (like mentioned earlier) is a Buddhist idea, which means either he read about it before his visions or he went into Buddhism because of this mutual point of view. They also shared the prophetic inner view of poetry, "transmitting that spontaneous awareness to Mankind". In fact, in the same letter to John Clellon Holmes he wrote about Blake's poems that "they are capable of summoning up in me, the sensation of eternity". 128 Seventeen years later he wrote with a scholarly perspective: Blake was also a social critic and rebel etc. but the ROOT of his work as of ours has been in exploration of modes of consciousness. 129 This complex and spiritual relationship is almost a transcendental paternity: Ginsberg is a man of vision and Blake "the invisible father of English visions" in "Wichita Vortex Sutra"130 .

Allen Ginsberg even depicts it as a deliberate choice in "Ego Confession":131 I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America

[…] Who saw Blake and abandoned God

The last line is rather ambiguous. It is difficult to determine whether it means that Blake is the reason Allen Ginsberg turned away from God, or if it is only a concomitant or a subsequent fact. In both cases, Blake represents here a spiritual and personal abstraction like God (which would be the reason why he wrote "saw" and not "read"). This atemporal harmony with Blake is at the heart of Ginsberg's writing. For example, by July 1948, that is to say the month the young Allen Ginsberg had visions of Blake, he composed a poem entitled "The Eye Altering Alters All". 132 The title of the poem is taken, as he said, from a "Buddhist" line of Blake's poem, "The Mental Traveller", which is, according to him in one of his 1976 classes, "one of the strangest poems ever written". 133 As we have seen, he mentioned his visions in "Howl", writing about himself as one of the protagonists of the poem, "hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-Light tragedy among the scholars of war". 134 Besides, in "The Footnotes to Howl", 135 there are fifteen repetitions of the word "Holy" ("Exuberance is Beauty" would say Blake 136 ) that begins the poem in which Allen Ginsberg claimed that "Everything is holy!". This repetition can remind the reader of Blake's "Vision of The Last Judgment" in which he wrote: "[…] I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty" 137 This repetition, especially when performed, seems to work like a fanatic liturgical trance whose aim is to frame the world, his world, into a word: "holy". But there are many more indirect references to Blake's poetry in these "footnotes". For example, the very idea of the At the end of the poem "What I'd Like to Do", he put himself in the continuity of William Blake's poetry and spirituality, wanting to:

Compose last choirs of Innocence & Experience, set music to tongues of Rossetti Mss. Orchestrate Jerusalem's quatrain -151 This desire to "set music to tongues" is very important in Allen Ginsberg's life. In fact, in a 1982 letter he wrote about "some projects I want to finish before I die" 152 and among the many projects, Allen Ginsberg wrote about putting Blake's poems into music: 6) Complete "Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake tuned by Allen Ginsberg". I've completed music and satisfactory recording of about 30 of the 45 poems in this series. […] What is available has found favor with Blake scholars and high school and college teachers and has been used as teaching aid in introducing students to Blake. 153 As biographer Barry Miles wrote, quoting Allen Ginsberg, it appears that setting music to Blake's poems was "a lovely extension" of the "mantra practice" of Allen Ginsberg. 154 He talked about how he came to put Blake's poems into music in an interview and it seems that it was a self-evident fact that began with the confusion between two Blake's poems, one about Lafayette and "The Grey Monk":

This tune came with it, for the first time and then I had confused it with another poem called "The Grey Monk" […]. So I got 'em mixed up and began hummin a tune in my heart on the bus. I got home I started working with a harmonium and making a tune for both poems [...] 155 He also sang in his classes on the history of poetry at the Naropa Institute, like in June 1975. 156 In this recording, he even stated that his aim in singing literally the Songs of Innocence and Experience was to "restore some of the vocalization to them by singing them, because they're a lot easier to understand sung". 157 He added, regarding the poem "Jerusalem", that it was important to sing it "because it has a certain natural music in it". 158 He also declared that this was the way Blake used to compose his poems: "He'd go to his friends' houses and chant unaccompanied", 159 writing "a cappella". 160 The place of music was very important in Ginsberg's poetry, and regarding Blake, Allen Ginsberg was so immersed in this project that he worked on the songs "over and over again". 161 Allen Ginsberg was desirous to also mix his own poetry with music and he wrote many poems to be sung, which were published along with scores like "A Western Ballad", 162 "Father Death Blues" 163 or "Gospel Nobel Truths". 164 In fact, another reference to William Blake's poetry is to be found in the politically engaged "The Ballad of the Skeletons", 165 written in 1995 and set into music:

Said the Gnostic Skeleton

The Human Form's Divine Said the Moral Majority skeleton No it's not its mine

The Moral Majority was an American association, engaged both in Christian rights and politics (republican party). In this passage, it is opposed to Gnosticism which is an intellectual tradition based on the belief that everybody has a divine soul and that we are all condemned to live in a material world. Therefore, it appears that on the one hand the Gnostic Skeleton praised the notion of divine included in everyone and on the other hand, the reader can guess that the Moral Majority Skeleton was only interested into subjugating people for its cause.

There is also a famous version of this poem with Paul McCartney, 166 and in fact Allen Ginsberg remembered having a "drunken night talking about pot and William Blake with the Beatles" in a 1965 letter. 167 He also used the expression "human form's divine" with a specific sense in an interview: 168 Anyway a whole series of India holy men pointed back to the bodygetting in the body rather than getting out of the human form. But living in and inhabiting the human form. Which then goes back to Blake again, the human form divine. This expression, "the human form's divine", is very similar to the one used by Blake in "The Divine Image" ("Prays to the human form divine" 169 ) and in "A Divine Image" ("Terror the human form divine" 170 ). In that sense, the "Gnostic Skeleton" is Blake, who was interested in many religions and philosophy. Ginsberg was indeed well aware of Blake's interests in esotericism; for that matter, in a 1970 poem entitled "Ecologue",171 William Blake appears between "Kabbalah, Gnostic Fragments, Mahanirvana & Hevajra Tantras, Boheme" and "Zohar, Gita & Soma Veda". Blake is part of Ginsberg's vast spiritual cosmology, not only as an influence for writing poetry, but as a real and solid spiritual connection. Later, Blake reappears between the poet Kabir and Allen Ginsberg himself. 172 As a matter of fact, he already made this connection between Blake and Oriental writings in 1966, 173 linking Blake's ideas to the Hindu Bhakti. He even talked about how he was advised to take Blake as his guru in Brindaban 174 and wrote about it in a poem ("Blake my Guru" 175 ) and in a letter to his father ("they sd Blake was my Guru" 176 ). This accepted and claimed spiritual generation shows how Ginsberg puts himself between the Orient and the Occident, as well as between poetry and spirituality. But to some extent, he had to split from the visions of Blake he had, as he declared in an interview: 177

[…] to attain the depths of consciousness that I was seeking when I was talking about the Blake vision, that in order to attain it I had to cut myself off from the Blake vision and renounce it. Otherwise I'd be hung up on a memory of an experience. Which is not the actual awareness of now, now.

This renouncement to Blake is also discussed by Barry Miles in his biography of Allen Ginsberg. 178 In his Indian Journals, some elements also show how strongly he was linked to those Blake visions:

When I was young you came with the voice of tender rock.

[…] Contact. Dear Blake,come back. 179 In this poem, he imagined Blake's "windows" in his "cottage" 180 and mentioned "ghat's sick rose" 181 which is of course a direct reference to William Blake's poem "The Sick Rose". At the end, in a state that sounds like desperation he wrote: Dear Blake

Ahch! 182

When trying peyote in Peru, Allen Ginsberg even wrote to William S. Burroughs that he did not know who to turn to, something new or his "own serpent-self's memory of merry visions of Blake". 183 It is not a simple affection or emotional attachment to those visions, as the other alternative is "death". 184 Regarding more precisely the idea of not being hung up "on a memory of an experience" like Allen Ginsberg declared in the interview mentioned above, and particularly this idea of a split between actual moment and memories, one can see the paradoxical link between Blake and Buddhism. When someone reaches a certain state of direct consciousness in a meditation session, he or she can be tempted to reach this state again, making the act of meditating a vain quest to find a memory or a copy of former perceptions, which is not a real state of awareness. But this does not mean that Allen Ginsberg switched from Blake to Buddhism. And this does not mean that Allen Ginsberg totally cut the link with Blake, even during this period of renouncement. Many times, he referred to the life-mask of William Blake and of his eyes closed 185 or noticed the complete works of Blake "unread" in a bookshelf. 186 In fact, the admiration he had toward William Blake haunted him until the very end of his life. The 30 th March 1997 (he died the 5 th April 1997) he wrote his last poem, the melancholic "Things I'll Not Do (Nostalgia)". 187 In this poem, he enumerated the things he loved or wanted to do while he knew at that moment that he was dying. By the end of the poem, he recalled his classes at the Naropa Institute:

No more sweet summers with lovers, teaching Blake at Naropa, […] Among the various and numerous things he taught at the Naropa Institute, he chose to write this particular memory of Blake, as a last nod to Blake a week before dying. In a 1979 letter he wrote about those classes on Blake:

I am here half year this year teaching Blake's prophetic book line by line (now finished with Lambeth books to 1795 and beginning on Urizena project that will take 2 years to complete with students here). 188 Teaching poetry was very important for Allen Ginsberg, like he wrote, just before illustrating his words by quoting William Blake's poem "The Schoolboy":

Poetry is the most sensitive speech we know […]. Attack and insult and ban poetry to our youth and you dumb their hearts, defend and praise and teach poetry to our youths and you lead their own natural hearts to utterance. 189 In this perspective, Blake is the poet who started to teach Ginsberg how to find his way through poetry, and who was then taught and transmitted by Allen Ginsberg himself. Blake is a central poet in Ginsberg's life, from his sensational visions of 1948 to his nostalgic final poem in 1997, written by someone who is thankful for all those memories, but saddened by his consciousness of death.

  […] I lay broad waking on a fabulous couch in Harlem having masturbated for no love, and read half-naked an open book of Blake on my lap Lo & behold! I was thoughtless and turned a page and gaze on the living Sun-Flower and heard a voice, it was Blake's, reciting in earthen measure: [...]

  thee, bleating lamb, I can lie down and sleep;

  Ginsberg's own mythology is reached in the beginning of the second part of "Howl": 80 What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! [...]

"

  Eternity shuddered when they saw Man begetting his likeness On his own divided image." I dream and dream. I can face anything but reality I can do anything but what is real I can be any actor but myself: I can write any poem but my own. Boasting Desks are dusty. Money, money, work and worry.

  holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? 112 Allen Ginsberg also referred to Albion and Jerusalem in another poem entitled "Liverpool Muse", written in 1965. This poem is about young people dancing to music and there are two epigraphs before the poem: Albion Albion your children dance again Jerusalem's rock established in the basements of satanic mills 113

Ibid., p. 151. "I began setting Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to music [because] they seemed the nearest thing to holy mantra or holy prayer that I could find in my own consciousness".

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 196. "and dreamed of Blake's voice talking"

Ibid., p. 1019.

Clark, Thomas, and Allen Ginsberg. op. cit.,[24][25]

Ibid., p. 25.

Ginsberg, Allen, and Bill Morgan. The Letters..., op. cit., p. 50.

Id.

Ibid., p. 324.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 415.

Ibid., p. 631.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 550.

Ginsberg, Allen, and Bill Morgan. The Letters..., op. cit., p. 400.

Ibid., p. 362.


With a few Traditions metrical, mystical, manly . . . and certain characteristic flaws enough! This poem is composed at a time when Ginsberg was traveling through various cities of Mexico; the first part was more precisely composed between Mexico and San Francisco, the second part was composed between Guanajuato and Los Angeles. The mention of Uxmal in the poem matches an entry of his personal journals of that time 2 (January 12 th , 1954 Uxmal).

According to John Lardas and his Spenglerian study of Ginsberg's poetry, this particular poem can be read as "America's position in the grand scheme of historical cycles" 3 because the very place of Xbalba is both "the Place of Death and the Place of Regenerative Powers" 4 in Mayan mythology. This idea of a wonderful land saved from a downfall is, of course, significant in Whitman's poetry. In fact, as an enthusiastic patriot of humanity and of America Whitman had

It is not chaos or death …. it is form and union and plan …. it is eternal life …. it is happiness. 5 This dualism between old and new, "death" and "life" is based, implicitly in Whitman, on a supposedly usual false reading of life. This led to his vision of social and political democracy as an "adhesiveness" between humans ("the sane, healthy love of man for man" 6 ), just like Ginsberg noticed in an essay on Walt Whitman, where he depicted him as a "sort of prophet of American Democracy". 7 But regarding more precisely the poem "Siesta in Xbalba And Return to the States", Ginsberg is making allusions to Walt Whitman, which gives the poem a global new meaning. For example, there are at least two references to Whitman's poetry in this stanza: So I dream nightly of an embarkation, captains, captains, iron passageways, cabin lights, Brooklyn across the waters, 8 The repetition of the word "captain" is of course a reminder of Whiman's "O Captain! my Captain!" 9 and the mention of Brooklyn a reminiscence of Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" 10 (which Allen Ginsberg also recorded 11 ). These references, which added to the explicit reference of Whitman "satisfied" by Ginsberg, include the former poet in the same branch of Whitman's poetry. In "Siesta in Xbalba", Ginsberg is discovering a new world, "wandering solitary in the wild" 12 through "Noble Ruins" 13 . In his self-abandonment, he drew a line (both textually and figuratively) between an omnipotent and eternal nature and the superficial society, the "culture of [his] generation": 14 As I leaned against a tree inside the forest expiring self-begotten love, I looked up at the stars absently, as if looking for something else in the blue night through the boughs, and for a moment saw myself leaning against a tree… … back there the noise of a great party in the apartments of New York This split between Uxmal, which seems a place for realization, authenticity and meditation, and the United-States is also revealed in his journals. Indeed, the day before returning to the heart of the United-States, while in Santa Ana, he asked:" What is the meaning of my life which waits for me to assign one?". 15 In Mexicali, near the frontier, he found the city "so noisy, dirty" with "deserted ghost streets and sad quiet aircooled diners [...]". 16 Thus, this gap appearing poetic in the words, typographic on the poem and emotional in his journals, acts like an invisible frontier between spirituality and materialism. The gap between his mind, his thoughts, and a superficial world is wide and it is to be found in his poem, which contains the "mind's raw content as in Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself", like Ginsberg depicted in a speech on meditation and poetics. 17 Allen Ginsberg is meditating on humanity, its interrogations and its contradictions: "I contradict myself; I am large …. I contain multitudes" 18 would say Whitman (as well as Emerson 19 ). Indeed, just like Whitman wrote at the beginning of "Song of Myself", "for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you", Allen Ginsberg made an inner mental revolution, a complete circle from him to himself while trying to pierce the universe's secret (from "leaned against a tree" to back to "leaning against a tree" in the extract above). Finally, to paraphrase Whitman (and Emerson 20 ), every atom belonging to Ginsberg belongs to the universe as well, which is very close to what Allen Ginsberg declared in an interview: I am taking the word from our prophet, Walt Whitman. This is the tradition of the Founding Fathers, this is the true myth of America, this is the prophecy of our most loved thinkers - 15 Ginsberg,Allen. Journals: Early...,op. cit.,p. 72. 16 Id. 17 Ginsberg,Allen,and Bill Morgan. Deliberate...,op. cit.,p. 265. 18 Whitman,Walt,and Stephen Matterson. op. cit.,p. 69. 19 This is also the meaning behind a poem published posthumously:

we are all one Great Being whose presence is familiar -To be It, need to be also the mosquito that bites me -I am also a mosquito on the Great Being. 22 Just like his sudden realization with Blake few years earlier, he is not a stranger in this world, nor a different being from the universe itself, nor the ruins of a modern world. In his personal journals of that time, from which a lot of expressions and verses are taken to compose the poem "Siesta in Xbalba", he wrote about how nostalgic the ruins turned him and how difficult the composition of this poem was, especially regarding romantic aspects of the ruins. His confrontation with the ruins seemed to have pulled the trigger of an uneasiness, realizing at the same time both the present and the past, the living and the dead, in a metaphysical and mystical way.

In the same year, 1954, and just like he did with Blake, Allen Ginsberg also composed a poem entitled "Love Poem on Theme by Whitman"23 and as Brian Docherty noticed,24 it is inspired by Whitman's poem "The Sleepers". 25 While Walt Whitman is considered to have written the spiritual and physical nakedness of men, Allen Ginsberg wrote without any filter about sexuality. In this poem, Ginsberg put two usually separate characteristics: the pure physical sexuality and the question of the self. In fact, he writes about someone who is trying to find his place in a fantasized situation where he slipped into the room "between the bridegroom and the bride". The erotic context of the darkness and the confusion of the senses frame the struggle of disillusionment. Indeed, the bride cries and the groom is "covered with tears" while the poet offers "kisses of farewell" before "the mind wakes". At the end, when the sexual tension was diminished, the "inhabitants" were described as "unsatisfied" and "seeking each other out in the silence". The dimension of physical pleasure is underlined in its vain but important quest, like a land from where the ship of the senses have to sail away toward a vision of oneself. Furthermore, in a witness statement for The Chicago Seven Trial, Allen Ginsberg tried to explain the religious significance of "Love Poem on Theme by

Whitman"26 concerning the plurality of love and lovers, and its natural aspects. This explanation links the poem to Whitman's concept of adhesiveness, and reveals the "unconscious" desire he tried to unlock from the moral. The religious aspect seems to be the natural love and its transcending expression in any form, especially spiritual, in order to find a way through the darkness. Allen Ginsberg also added that Walt Whitman was "one of [his] spiritual teachers" and that he is "following him in this poem". 27 Ginsberg realized himself through the model of Whitman, and the vocabulary Ginsberg uses in this poem is very close to Whitman's, who wrote in "Song of Myself":28

An unseen hand also passed over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

In another poem entitled "Many Loves", Allen Ginsberg also affirms his sexual choices, mixing physical and psychological seduction under an epigraph by Walt Whitman, like a leitmotiv he followed his whole life:

"Resolved to sing no songs henceforth but those of manly attachment"29

This poem goes further into sexual acts and explicit words, altogether with both a lyric and erotic dimension, with a re-introduced innocence after its loss in nowadays' concept of politically correct. Of course, Allen Ginsberg's use of sexual and explicit terms is inherited from Whitman, at least in philosophical and social basis:

A main stream of American thought embodied in our national poet Walt Whitman maintains that complete freedom of expression in this area of sexual imagery is essential to the development of our social and political system as a free-personed democracy. [START_REF] Ginsberg | [END_REF] According to scholar John Tytell, Allen Ginsberg "saw Whitman as a sexual revolutionary". [START_REF] Tytell | Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg[END_REF] This total emancipation of words Allen Ginsberg asked for and wrote about is still today a major issue. In 2015, a teacher even lost his job when a student "asked to share Allen Ginsberg's poem "Please Master". [START_REF] Stern | A High School Teacher Was Forced to Resign for Sharing an Allen Ginsberg Poem. How Absurd[END_REF] Considering the natural aspects of the texture of Ginsberg's poems and their pure and tacit agreements, the poems "Love Poem on Theme by

Whitman" and "Many Loves" seem in the direct genealogy of Whitman's idea of candor. As Ginsberg remarked: "Whitman's word, for what he asked from the future poets, was "candor". 33 In "Cosmopolitan Greetings", Allen Ginsberg gives advice, from trivial recommendations ("don't drink yourself to death" 34 ) to more philosophical thoughts, close to quantum theory ("two molecules clanking against each other require an observer to / become scientific data" 35 ). But it is also the occasion for him to explain what candor really is or how "Candor ends paranoia". 36 If candor seems to be of capital importance to Allen Ginsberg, it has to be defined in precise terms. Walt Whitman in his 1855 preface of Leaves of Grass wrote:

Men and women and the earth and all upon it are simply to be taken as they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be unintermitted and shall be done with perfect candor. Upon this basis philosophy speculates ever looking toward the poet, ever regarding the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness never inconsistent with what is clear to the senses and to the soul. 37 Candor therefore appears as an anti-filter for the soul, to see with the mind rather than with the eyes. This view of the world, without prejudice, artifice nor false statement helps to build a true vision of oneself. According to Whitman, followed by Ginsberg later, candor is absolutely compulsory for a poet who tends to embody a figure of pure being:

The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor. 38 And candor leads to both global and personal examinations in order to complete an objective reflection on every being. This is to be found in one of the most well-known poems of Allen Ginsberg: "A Supermarket in California". 39 It is interesting to notice that this poem was also referred to as simply "Whitman" in a letter Allen Ginsberg wrote to his father. 40 In this poem, Ginsberg is directly speaking to Walt Whitman: "What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt

Whitman", 41 as an echo to Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" ("What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you" 42 ). Allen Ginsberg is asking apparently innocent questions that 33 Ginsberg,Allen,and David Carter. op. cit.,p. 506. 34 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 954. 35 Id. 36 Ibid., p. 955 37 Whitman,Walt,and Stephen Matterson. op. cit.,p. 501. 38 Ibid., p. 504. 39 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 144. 40 Ginsberg, Allen, and Louis Ginsberg. Family Business: Selected Letters between a Father and Son. Ed. Michael Schumacher. London: Bloomsbury, 2001, p. 37. 41 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 144. 42 Whitman, Walt, and Stephen Matterson. op. cit., p. 124. gradually evolve into metaphysical questions, just like the apparent simplicity of Whitman's statements in "Song of Myself". If two respective passages are put side by side, the similarities are uncanny, both in form and content: From the usual to the existential, from the food to the Man, both passages have the same construction and lexical field. In a letter explaining the poem, Allen Ginsberg gives credits to Walt Whitman as a deep influence:

He was the first great American poet to take action in recognizing his individuality, forgiving and accepting Him Self, and automatically extending that recognition and acceptance to all […] Without self-acceptance, there can be no acceptance of other souls. 44 The figure of Walt Whitman also haunts the work of Allen Ginsberg for particular aspects. For example, in the long poem "Iron Horse", 45 Walt Whitman is mentioned twice explicitly and at least once indirectly. The first time Whitman appears, Allen Ginsberg writes Whitman, Carpenter, Gavin Arthur, saying We are leaves of the Tree saying We are drops of water running to the ocean thru the fish's mouth - 46 In this extract, Walt Whitman is more than the figure of the poet: Ginsberg put Whitman near Carpenter and Gavin Arthur for precise reasons. By the name of Carpenter, he must be referring to the poet Edward Carpenter mentioned earlier in the poem. 47 He is known for his involvement in favor of sexual freedom and homosexuality. He encountered Whitman in 43 Ibid., p. 37-38. 44 Ginsberg, Allen, and Bill Morgan. The Letters..., op. cit., p. 137-138. 45 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 440. 46 Ibid., p. 443 47 Ibid., p. 442 many occasions and according to Martin Murray, Carpenter said that Whitman was "before all a lover of the Male" 48 and that Carpenter had been "sexual" 49 with Whitman. As for Gavin Arthur, he is known for a book entitled The Circle of Sex (in which Edward Carpenter also appears). It is unsure, but Gavin Arthur maybe had an affair with Edward Carpenter and Neal Cassady, which made Allen Ginsberg having an affair with Walt Whitman by proxy as he declared:

Neal Cassady, Dean Moriarty, who slept with Gavin Arthur, who slept with Edward Carpenter, who slept with Whitman. And I slept with Dean (Neal Cassady), so... 50 This link in time and this distant physical love is what Allen Ginsberg calls "the Whispered Transmission, capital W, capital T". 51 There is also a direct homosexual allusion in "A Supermarket in California" to be linked with Walt Whitman, when Ginsberg depicts him "eyeing the grocery boys". 52 There is also a deeper allusion, written between brackets:

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) 53 This line can be ambiguous because, according to Ginsberg quoting Whitman about Leaves of Grass, "who touches this book touches a man". 54 Allen Ginsberg also quoted this particular passage in another poem written like a tribute to Walt Whitman, "I Love Old Whitman So". 55 Furthermore, while the ambiguity about Whitman's sexuality is still an unanswered question among specialists, Allen Ginsberg is pretty sure of Whitman's homosexuality, offering a new reading of Walt Whitman's poetry, a "homoerotic rhapsody". 56 Allen Ginsberg even saw homosexuality in Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman", full of "erotic beauty" regarding men. 57 At least, Allen Ginsberg himself described his homosexuality as "Whitmanic". 58 The poem "A Supermarket in California" and its poetical aspects, leads us to our second part, examining how Whitman influenced Allen Ginsberg's poetical vision.

In fact, one of the most important words of the poem "A Supermarket in California" is the final word, which is "Lethe". 59 First of all, the word includes a mythological dimension and gives a retro-actively new meaning to the poem, which becomes a timed metaphorical quest ("Where are we going tonight, Walt Whitman? […] the doors close in an hour"). Then, it also means that Walt Whitman is, on the one hand, pictured in hell by the author and on the other hand, there is a kind of disappointment because Lethe is also the river of forgetfulness.

In both cases, "America" is forgetting the lessons Walt Whitman gave in his poems on democracy and Allen Ginsberg depicts him on the verge of his final disappearance, making the immobility of thoughts a sudden flash in which they both "stroll dreaming of the lost America of love". Is the actual America to be found in "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" 60 in which "the American Century [is] betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife" (personifying this way the political institutions)? Is it where Garcia Lorca (who appeared by the watermelons in "A Supermarket in California") is "the fairy son of Whitman" killed by Franco? It seems that it is, because Whitman "warned against this "fabled Damned of Nations" later in the poem. 61 This expression is also to be found in Allen Ginsberg's acceptance speech for the National Book Award in Poetry for his book The Fall of America, seventeen years after "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!". 62 The influence of Whitman is so deep that not only did he influence him on his opinions, but he also influenced his way of writing. For example, it is interesting to notice that the passage "hankering, gross, mystical, nude" 63 of Whitman is very similar to Ginsberg's "Howl" which opens by "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked". 64 And this similarity goes further because the original typed draft of this poem opened with "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness starving, mystical, naked". 65 According to Allen Ginsberg, the change of the word "mystical" into "hysterical is a "crucial revision" 66 and he uses the famous Whitmanian expression to justify this modification ("Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / I am large, I contain multitudes."). The influence of Whitman on "Howl" is considerable; another example is the epigraph of "Howl" which is a quote from "Song Of Myself" which reads:

"Unscrew the locks from the doors! 59 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 144. 60 Ibid., p. 75. 61 Ibid., p. 177 62 Ginsberg,Allen,and Bill Morgan. Deliberate...,op. cit.,p. 19. 63 Whitman,Walt,and Stephen Matterson. op. cit., Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 134. 65 Ginsberg, Allen. Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" 67 This epigraph is a real symbol of the content of "Howl", which tends to dismantle and criticize the modern era and its alienation. This point could be linked to the first line of the epigraph. But in "Howl", Allen Ginsberg even praises a kind of madness, which in this case is the very idea of the epigraph's second line. Whitman's poetry and personality spread visually through the poem in its form, the free verse and "the long democratic-minded inclusive verse-line of Whitman". 68 According to an essay on "Howl" Allen Ginsberg wrote in 1959, the writing techniques of Walt Whitman "had rarely been further explored (improved on even)". 69 He added that "no attempt's been made to use it in the light of early twentieth century organization of new speech-rhythm prosody to build up large organic structure". This point of view is also shared by Gregory Corso, another famous beat writer, with whom Ginsberg wrote a manifesto about the reading of "Howl" at the Six Gallery (in 1955). 70 In this manifest, they wrote about "Howl":

The poem initiates a new style in composition in the U.S., returning to the bardic-strophic tradition, till now neglected in the U.S., of Apollinaire, Whitman, Artaud, Lorca, Mayakovsky and improving on the tradition to the extent of combining the long lines and coherence of Whitman [...] From his extension of modern poetry, Allen Ginsberg is indirectly paying tribute to the great influence Whitman had on the very writing of "Howl". This tribute is unequivocal in one of the early non-edited typescript of "Howl", in which Whitman appears between Wolfe and Buddha: To some extent, Whitman is at the heart of the poem in a symbolic way, for at least two reasons. First, Whitman offered him the appropriate structure for both Ginsberg's poetry and his aim. This point is intuitively revealed by the end of the first part of "Howl": 72 To recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his 67 Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 809. 68 Ginsberg, Allen, and Bill Morgan. The Letters..., op. cit., p. 405. 69 Ginsberg,Allen,and Bill Morgan. Deliberate...,op. cit.,p. 230. 70 Ibid., p. 239-242. 71 Ginsberg,Allen. Howl: Original...,op. cit.,p. 23. 72 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit., naked and endless head, Concerning this stanza, the perspective of Allen Ginsberg is insightful. Indeed, in a note 73 he clarified what he meant, which has to do with Whitman's "perfect personal candor" described in the 1855 preface of Leaves of Grass. 74 This is the same "candor" we encountered earlier but it is more precisely "the role of poetry as revealing naked mind, identical self with the experience (and suffering) of love". 75 The work of Ginsberg concerning the composition of the poem and his aim to speak the language of the soul without artifice is, in a way, performative: He is writing what he is trying to write, like a mise en abyme. After the publication of the poem, his Whitmanian inspiration would also instigate reproach from some critics, who read the poem like "a weak imitation of a form that was used eighty or ninety years ago by Walt Whitman". 76 This influence of Whitman on Allen Ginsberg and "Howl", can also be amusingly found in the edition proposal of this poem. After the reading of the poem by Ginsberg at the Six Gallery, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a telegram to Ginsberg which reads "I greet you at the beginning of a great career", 77 quoting deliberately what Emerson wrote to Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass. 78 This anecdote is not that naive. It also appears to be a real bridge between Ginsberg and Whitman built by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, linking the two poets for the content of their poetry and their attitude toward the role of the poet. In fact, in "Adapted From Neruda's "Que dispierte el leñador", 79 which is a translation of Pablo Neruda's "Let the Railsplitters Awake", Allen Ginsberg completed his view regarding the role of the poet. Pablo Neruda's poem is built the same way some of Whitman's poems are and contains a lot of references, both to Whitman and Whitman's themes. If Allen Ginsberg translated the words of Pablo Neruda, the reason is that the text certainly pleased him. When compared to Whitman's poem "Poets to Come", 80 a sensation of a shared point of view and mutual ideas appears:

Ginsberg/Neruda I'm nothing more than a poet: 73 Ginsberg,Allen. Howl: Original...,op. cit.,p. 138. 74 Whitman,Walt,and Stephen Matterson. op. cit.,Allen. Howl: Original...,op. cit.,p. 23. 76 Ibid.,p. 173. 77 Ibid.,p. 167. 78 Words and Deeds in American History. Digital image. The Library of Congress. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Mar. 2016. <http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=mcc&fileName=012/page.db&recNum=1&itemLink=r%3Fammem%2Fmcc%3A%40fie ld%28DOCID%2B%40lit%28mcc%2F012%29%29>. 79 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,704. 80 Whitman, Walt, and Stephen Matterson. op. cit., p. 13 Arouse! For you must justify me.

[…]

Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main thing from you. 82 Walt Whitman is a companion, a comrade with whom Allen Ginsberg shares the same thoughts. But more than that, Allen Ginsberg admitted that Walt Whitman was both an inspiration and a reason to take the pen in "Improvisation in Beijing". 83 In fact, it summarizes a lot of the main themes and writing techniques Allen Ginsberg uses in his poetry, like the candor he praises in poems like "Love on Theme by Walt Whitman": I write poetry because Walt Whitman gave world permission to speak with candor. 84 Or recognizing indirectly the strong influence of Whitman's style on the structure of poems like "Howl": I write poetry because Walt Whitman opened up poetry's verse-line for unobstructed breath. 85 Allen Ginsberg also plainly refers to the eternal bridge built between them, thanks to their respective poetry, just like he wrote about William Blake. And it works the other way, for he can talk to both present and future generations too: I write poetry to talk back to Whitman, young people in ten years, talk to old aunts and uncles still living near Newark, New Jersey. 86 81 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 706. 82 Whitman,Walt,and Stephen Matterson. op. cit.,p. 13. 83 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 937. 84 Id. 85 Id. 86 Ibid., p. 938 asked by Confucius (Ginsberg read Ezra Pound's translations of Confucius 87 ):

I write poetry because Chuang-tzu couldn't tell whether he was butterfly or man, Lao-tzu said waters flows downhill, Confucius said honor elders, I wanted to honor Whitman. 88 What is interesting in this verse, is that Walt Whitman is named along with three major figures of eastern wisdom. Furthermore, Allen Ginsberg throws bridges between two different figures, both in time and areas, building an implicit link between them and reinforcing the strength of literature which goes beyond time and space. The last mention of Whitman in "Improvisation on Beijing" goes with the following verse: Here Allen Ginsberg expresses his gratitude toward Walt Whitman who depicted what is going through Ginsberg's mind (contradiction) and that it is not a flaw but a quality acting like a poetical catalyst waiting to be developed and written. Walt Whitman is therefore a complex figure, especially when it comes to be analyzed under the prism of Allen Ginsberg's mind and work. In fact, many times Walt Whitman appeared as a prophet, like in "Ode to Failure" where Whitman is named along with Mayakovski, Alexander the Great, Monet and many others: Though in Allen Ginsberg's poem "Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber" it is his turn to prophesy like Whitman 90 and that Allen Ginsberg himself defined himself as a "54 years old Prophet" 91 in "Ode to Failure", it appears in the passage above that Walt Whitman "failed" and addressed "losers". This of course refers to the eighteenth section of Whitman's "Song of Myself": 87 Ginsberg, Allen. Journals Mid-fifties, 1954-1958. Ed. Gordon Ball. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996, p. 213. 88 Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 938. 89 Ibid., p. 745 90 Ibid., p. 280 "I prophesy" is repeated four times in a row. 91 Ibid., p. 745 I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons […] Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! 92 Allen Ginsberg is surely mimicking Walt Whitman in verbalizing the Whitman's word "vivas" and in adopting the form "viva'd" just like Whitman use in "conquer'd" and "fail'd". So This is not a failure because what appears as the aim of his poetry, and to a certain extent his vision on the role of the poet, are so beyond reach and utopian that it can only eventually lead to a failure to accomplish it. This is the case concerning Mankind but also regarding his hope for his own soul: I never got to Heaven, Nirvana, X, Watchamacallit, I never left Earth, I never learned to die. 94 In joining Walt Whitman and many other artists in this "Ode to Failure", Allen Ginsberg confessed that poetry can only head toward a universal peaceful humankind without necessarily a success in its aims. But what is important is that some invested poets are altruistically trying their best to change the course of History and this why Allen Ginsberg wrote "O Failure I chant your terrifying name". He strongly believes in poetry as a tool with a Whitmanic use, which, as we have seen, can be then read in his own poems. In a journal entry of 1956 (July 5th) he wrote in a passage about Whitman:

The poetry attempts to express & validate or see as real his own feelings which are genuine, the struggle to find a way to feel he actually felt in conflict with what he thot was possible on earth with society & people & boys - 95 What is interesting in this passage is that the verb "attempt" is used twenty-four years before the poem "Ode to Failure" and its confession regarding the failure of the poet/prophet. In fact, this is a reminder of Whiman's candor, as he wrote in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass: 92 Whitman,Walt,and Stephen Matterson. op. cit.,p. 37. 93 Ibid., p. 745 94 Id. 95 Ginsberg, Allen. Journals Mid-fifties..., op. cit., p. 273. This line is the proof that, just like he felt with William Blake, he is taking up the torch, which here has the form of a cudgel. Considering a more personal work of Allen Ginsberg, published posthumously and for the first time in a book, Walt Whitman also appears to be the confidant of Allen Ginsberg, more precisely on the fate of America: In this poem, an extract of "what he called a longer poem on politics", 119 Allen Ginsberg complains to Walt Whitman about a threat over America, symbolized by police violence ("nightstick"). This induces the fact that Walt Whitman must have been some kind of a guardian of America, or at least an embodiment of a certain vision of America, shared by the two poets. And this is maybe why in "Salutations to Fernando Pessoa", Fernando Pessoa being another admirer of Walt Whitman, 120 Allen Ginsberg wrote; inmost private desire" which could be responsible for feeling "alienated".125 Allen Ginsberg's intimacy with a Whitmanic vision of America is also confirmed in the poem "For the Soul of the Planet is Wakening". 126 In this poem, advocating for a mind's revolution against "satanic cities & nations", Allen Ginsberg writes: In this extract the poet says that Blake and Whitman implicitly showed the way toward "new selves" and puts the emphasis on their consciousness of the world. Walt Whitman is once described by Allen Ginsberg in his journals with a "guarded look" which must be a case of "self-imposed repression & consciousness", still according to Ginsberg. This image of Walt Whitman is the image of someone who knows a lot without wanting to say everything, that is to say the figure of a wise prophet. But it seems that Blake and Whitman had different influences on Allen Ginsberg. Indeed, while Blake's influence operated more on Ginsberg's mysticism and symbolism, the influence of Whitman seems to have been more prone to affect Ginsberg's involvement in politics. At sixteen years old, as biographer Barry Miles noticed, Allen Ginsberg wanted to "devote his life to helping the working class" and go to law school in order to be a lawyer. 127 There are clues that introduce a link between this vocation and the influence of Walt Whitman on him. For example, in a poem entitled "Thoughts on a Breath", Allen Ginsberg wrote: The whole poem is a criticism of capitalism and of the modern industrial America, just like in "Howl" and many other of Ginsberg's poems. Whitman is here the man who "knew" the human being as an entity with feelings ("sexual intelligent horny"), with a physical condition "speech tradition". 135 There is another mention of Whitman's view of America in the poem "Iron Horse", more precisely in its second part:

And Hart Crane's myth and Whitman's -What'll happen to that? 136 Allen Ginsberg must be referring to Hart Crane's poem "The Bridge", which is a long poem about America, particularly about New-York and the Brooklyn Bridge. Regarding the context of Ginsberg's poem, which is actively advocating for a global pacifism, Whitman's myth surely refers to his own view of Brooklyn in his poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". 137 In that way, he is placing himself after Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, keeping the desire to build a new America that would be alive, deeply involved in freedom and peace. In a 1956 letter to Richard Eberhart, 138 he put Hart Crane and Walt Whitman side by side once more, quoting them as examples of a criticism regarding the suppression of "our expression of natural ecstasy". 139 He also mentioned the two authors in an interview, but this time about their different views on America: And there's also this, in a sense, the fall of America as a nation-state and the fall of any national concept. And an appreciation of the Amer-Indian vision of America as "Turtle Island", the actual land like in Hart Crane, rather than in America like in Whitman,Kerouac,or myself. 140 Once more, Allen Ginsberg seems to feel closer to Whitman's idea of America for he placed himself on the side of Whitman. And this idea of a former America, a true original country which means an America of the origins also appears at the end of "Iron Horses", where Allen Ginsberg wrote: Mannahatta's tunnel-door cobbled for traffic, trucks into that mouth 141 The mention of Mannahatta, which is the ancient name for Manhattan 142 ("the aboriginal name"143 ), refers to a poem of Walt Whitman entitled "Mannahatta". 144 Considering the use of the word "myth" and the use of an ancient name for Manhattan, both leading toward Whitman's poems and cosmogony, it seems that Allen Ginsberg had in mind a precise conception of New-York, an original New-York.

Allen Ginsberg also gave a precise role to Whitman regarding his visions on America.

In "Plutonean Ode" in which Ginsberg wrote about Whitman as "a modern epic"145 in the last part of the poem. This time, Walt Whitman is a symbolic father, both for Allen Ginsberg's poetry and America:

This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you father Whitman as I join your side, you congress and American people, 146 Walt Whitman acts like a father and this of course is a reminder of the founding fathers, "defining American possibility" like Allen Ginsberg wrote in his journals. 147 In that sense, Whitman appears to Allen Ginsberg like a visionary who embodies a new America, an "ignu"148 along with Blake as we saw earlier. Furthermore, and as a poetic and humanist conclusion to this study, Allen Ginsberg wrote in his journals what every Whitman's reader must feel today: Walt Whitman thou shdst be living at this Hour!149

GinsbergI

  heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? Whitman Who goes there! Hankering, gross, mystical, nude? How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? What is a man anyhow? What am I? And what are you? 43

I

  write poetry because Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" I write poetry because my mind contradicts itself, one minute in New York, next minute the Dinaric Alps.

  Many prophets have failed, their voice silent […] Walt Whitman viva'd local losers [...] 89

  this is not an ordinary failure, nor a total failure, and the reader gets to know it at the end of Ginsberg's poem: I never dissolved Plutonium or dismantled the nuclear Bomb before my skull lost hair I have not yet stopped the Armies of entire Mankind in their march toward World War III 93

O

  Walt Whitman salutations you knew the laborer, the sexual intelligent horny handed man who lived in Dirt and fixed the axles of Capitalism, dumbed and Laughing at hallucinated Secretaries Of State! 128

  .

	I want love for you all,
	[...]
	I didn't come here to solve anything
	I came here to sing
	And for you to sing with me 81
	Whitman
	Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for
	[…]

Ginsberg, Allen, and Bill Morgan. Deliberate..., op. cit., p. 68.

Ginsberg, Allen, and Rachel Zucker. Wait Till I'm Dead: Uncollected Poems. Ed. Bill Morgan. UK: Penguin, 2016, p. 35.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 123.

Docherty, Brian. "On "Love Poem on a Theme by Whitman"" Modern American Poetry. University of Illinois, n.d. Web. 01 Mar. 2016. <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/lovepoem.htm>.

Whitman, Walt, and Stephen Matterson. op. cit.,

Ginsberg, Allen, and David Carter. op. cit., p. 241.

Ibid., p. 242.

Whitman, Walt, and Stephen Matterson. op. cit., p. 31.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 164.

Whitman, Walt, and Stephen Matterson. op. cit., p. 376.

Ibid., p. 132.

Ginsberg, Allen, and Rachel Zucker. op. cit., p. 101.

Miles, Barry. Allen Ginsberg -A Biography. London: Virgin, 2002, p. 32.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 638.

Whitman, Walt, and Stephen Matterson. op. cit., p. 300.

Whitman, Walt, and Stephen Matterson. op. cit., p. 350.

Id.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 710.

Ibid., p. 713.

Ginsberg, op. cit., p. 389.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected..., op. cit., p. 211.

Ginsberg, Allen. Journals: Early…, op. cit., p. 156.

According to Allen Ginsberg, Whitman's Democratic Vistas, is almost "a program for a new race of poets". 97 And some poets went beyond History when they tried to sound out the mystical nature of Man and the notion of Universe. According to Allen Ginsberg's reasoning in "Cosmopolitan Greetings", Walt Whitman did it:

The universe is subjective.

Walt Whitman celebrated Person.

We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.

Universe is Person. 98 This affirmation echoes to an excerpt of a poem in his journals of 1961: "Before me, Whitman saw Space". 99 But most of all, it is a beautiful testimony on the role of poets who can observe both the outside world and the inner struggles. According to an opinion shared by Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman, as we have seen, the poet is therefore a pure observer and a skilled writer who can operate a metamorphose on three levels: Himself, the world he lives in and his readers. This is just like Allen Ginsberg wrote, summarizing his own views on Whitman's poetry: "[…] despite the dark night of the soul in America, the illumination is intact in the poets". 100 And Whitman's vision of America strongly influenced Allen Ginsberg's, as we will see in a third part.

Walt Whitman influenced Allen Ginsberg on his political background and on his very

definition of what the United-States is. "America" is indeed the name of one of the most wellknown poems written by Allen Ginsberg. Throughout this poem, the author is showing his strong disapproval regarding American politics. The poet personifies the figure of America by asking numerous questions, for example about war ("America when will we end the human war?" 101 ) or using provoking statements for the fifties ("America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry", 102 "I smoke marijuana every chance I get"... 103 ). The subject of this poem is directly inherited from Whitman, who also wrote a poem entitled "America" (as well as William Blake 104 ). But while Whitman is depicting, expecting and even 96 Whitman,Walt,and Stephen Matterson. op. cit.,p. 504. 97 Ginsberg,Allen,and Louis Ginsberg. op. cit.,p. 72. 98 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 954. 99 Ginsberg,Allen. Journals: Early...,op. cit.,p. 195. 100 Ginsberg,Allen,and Bill Morgan. The Letters...,op. cit.,p. 189. 101 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 154. 102 Id. 103 Id. 104 Blake, William, and Geoffrey Keynes. Blake Complete Writings; with Variant Readings. London: Oxford UP, 1972, p. 195. prophesying a land of freedom, "centre of equal daughters, equal sons", 105 Ginsberg is actively aggressive: "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb" 106 , "I'm sick of your insane demands"... 107 And little by little, Ginsberg realizes that he is part of America ("It occurs to me that I am America. / I am talking to myself again." 108 ). In this poem, Ginsberg offers his view on America, criticizing money ("When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?" 109 ), sometimes with a powerful irony and parody ("America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe" 110 ) but also politics ("America free Tom Mooney" 111 ), racial segregation ("America I am the Scottsboro boys" 112 )

and for the last verse, writing about his homosexuality: "America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel". 113 All along this poem, he uses the anaphoric "America", just like the repeated base "who" in "Howl" or "Birdbrain" in the eponymous poem later. He also plays on sounds and rhythm to criticize Indians' conditions:

That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. 114 In this passage, he mimics Indian stereotyped speech "Ugh" to make it evolve toward "Help".

In fact, Allen Ginsberg embodies everyone and everything, from basic human rights, individuals or concepts to important figures of American History. This is exactly what

Whitman wrote in the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass about the role of the poet:

"[…] He is the equalizer of his age and land..." 115 and:

"The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately he has absorbed it." 116 Even if the word "affectionately" is in the case of Allen Ginsberg ironic, he is therefore following the definition of the poet inherited from Whitman, "absorbed" and involved in his country. Indeed, in an early draft of his poem "America", Allen Ginsberg wrote:

I Allen Ginsberg Bard out of New jersey take up the laurel tree cudgel From Whitman 117

("who lived in Dirt"), rather than objectifying it as a tool for the industry. In fact, in a 1956 letter, Allen Ginsberg depicts Walt Whitman as "crucial in development of American psyche". 129 Once more, Allen Ginsberg used poetry as a tool to denounce governmental abuses, praising "the spectacle of Poesy triumphant over the trickery of the world [...]". 130 Walt Whitman is therefore an essential influence to understand the political consciousness behind Ginsberg's poetry. Like Allen Ginsberg wrote in his journals of 1956:

Whitman first noticed the ants in Americathen Kerouac 131

From his own experiment with Whitman's poetry to the use of his own interpretation on Whitman, Allen Ginsberg developed a political poetry suffused with a long tradition of raising awareness. In many of his political poems, Allen Ginsberg often quotes or implicitly refers to Walt Whitman as we have seen in the examples above. This also the case in the engaged and whirlwind shaped poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra", 132 written against the war in Vietnam, in which Allen Ginsberg wrote: This is referring to a real trip Walt Whitman made in 1879 as Robert R. Hubach noticed. 133 Furthermore, as Hubach explained, Whitman wrote a poem in 1880 entitled "The Prairie

States". The beginning of this poem contains the same precise expression "iron interlaced"

Ginsberg uses in the extract from "Wichita Vortex Sutra" above:

A newer garden of creation, no primal solitude, Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms, With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one 134

In "Wichita Vortex Sutra", Allen Ginsberg also used Kansas as a background for his poem, just like Whitman did for "The Prairie States". It also important to notice that in Ginsberg's poem, the word "Hand" has a capital H, changing a simple hand into a symbol of a way to follow, just like in a biblical relationship between Men and God. Allen Ginsberg even compared "Whitman's line" with "biblical sentences in psalms", made in order to mimic 129 Ginsberg,Allen,and Bill Morgan. The Letters...,op. cit.,p. 132. 130 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 631. 131 Ginsberg,op. cit.,p. 272. 132 Ginsberg,Allen. Collected...,op. cit.,p. 402. 133