PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE
49
Yet this loneliness does not call itself that; it calls itself revolu–
tionary. In a long and now celebrated American poem simply called
Howl,
the young poet Allen Ginsberg has taken Whitman's long line
and has described an hallucinated tour of America that reverses Whit–
man's celebration and becomes an exultant nightmare of denuncia–
tion:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an
angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to
the starr)' dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat Itlp smoking
in the supernatural darkness .of cold-water flats floating
across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw M ohammed–
an angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who cowered in unshav,en rooms in their underwear, burning their
money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through
the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with
a belt .of marijuana for New Y.ork.
...
Now this abstractness contrasts very sharply with the lyric and
sensuous imagery with which sexual desire or activity used to be de–
scribed by writers who were famous for their prophetic, unconven–
tional concern with the subject. I have not the space to spell out in
its required and fascinating detail the kind of imagery which one
finds
in
Whitman's "Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking,"
in
the
love scenes of D. H. Lawrence's
Sons And Lovers,
in the glorious
pages of Colette, who could portray sex as the union not only of man
and woman but of man and the whole physical world of earth
sounds and earth smells, of colors and nuances; in those pages of
Proust where, despite the pain of Swann's jealousy of Odette, one
feels the gasping sharpness of real desire and the excitement of the
great
city that is its background and stimulus. Perhaps I have made
