Late Modernism. Robert Genter

of high modernism, Lionel Trilling and Mark van Doren, Ginsberg had spent the previous academic year trying to come to terms with their austere visions. But after an evening of reading William Blake and masturbating in his bed, Ginsberg received his own visions. Absentmindedly glancing at Blake’s poem “Ah! Sunflower,” Ginsberg heard “a very deep earthen grave voice in the room,” the voice of Blake himself telling Ginsberg that the young college student was the weary sunflower searching for spiritual redemption.¹⁰⁷ With this revelation came an increased sense of perception, a “sudden visual realization of the same awesome phenomenon,” allowing Ginsberg to see through the façade of the world around him and to gain “a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise” (123). Floating away from his own body, peering past temporal existence, and achieving a form of bliss, Ginsberg promised himself to never abandon the experience: “Never deny the voice—no, never forget it, don’t get lost mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds.” Even more convinced of his visionary experience when the feeling again came over him later that week in the Columbia University bookstore, Ginsberg set out on a lifelong spiritual journey to convince others of their connection to this eternal consciousness.

      Ginsberg’s immediate response was to share this experience with his university professors. None were encouraging. As one of Ginsberg’s biographers has described, “when Allen ran into the English department office, saying, ‘I just saw the light!’ Mark van Doren was the only professor who was sympathetic and asked him what he meant. Trilling and the others thought Allen had finally gone over the edge.”¹⁰⁸ Even more troubling, Ginsberg had difficulty finding an adequate poetic voice of his own to translate his Blakean vision. Committed to the formal structure of poetry with its determined rhyme and syncopated meter and heavily borrowing motifs from his Romantic predecessors, Ginsberg merely produced straightforward, closed descriptions of his original experience. Eventually realizing that his Blakean vision was not simply about a spiritual reconciliation with the eternal but the transcendence of the quotidian through a deeper, more meaningful investigation of the world itself and encouraged by the example of William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg brought a new sense of openness into his poetry, rejecting his earlier focus on quatrains for a detailed examination of his immediate experience. As Ginsberg explained later in life, “after writing some very formalistic poetry, I decided I’d let loose whatever I wanted to let loose with and say what I really had on my mind and not write a poem, finally—break my own forms, break my own ideals, what I was supposed to be like as a poet and just write whatever I had in mind.”¹⁰⁹ The difficulty, according to Ginsberg, was that in the late 1940s “the academic people were ignoring Williams and ignoring Pound and Louis Zukofsky and Mina Loy and Basil Bunting and most of the major rough writers of the Whitmanic, open form tradition in America” (93).

      Unable to confront the horrors of the atomic age because of their commitment to “leaden verse” and because of their useless defense of the humanities as an academic subject, the New Critics, argued Ginsberg, ironically encouraged a false reconciliation with the Cold War landscape. As “consciousness within the academy was narrowing down, becoming more anxious and rigid,” Ginsberg and his fellow Beat writers deliberately experimented with poetic form to reassert the fundamental connection between aesthetics and everyday life and thereby to transfigure the reified consciousness pervading American society. Determined to reassert man’s fundamental spontaneity, physicality, and spiritual nature, Ginsberg chided formalist aesthetics: “Mind is shapely, Art is shapely, Meaning Mind practiced in spontaneity invents form in its own image and gets to Last Thoughts. Loose ghosts wailing for body try to invade the bodies of living man. I hear ghostly Academics in Limbo screeching about form.”¹¹⁰ Ginsberg’s most acclaimed experimentation with open form was of course his 1955 poetic manifesto, Howl. Dispensing with any self-consciousness or fear, Ginsberg opened his poetic voice to the spontaneous, logically inconsistent, and unconscious thoughts that emerged from his contemplation of the world around him, what he once referred to as “prosaic realities mixed with emotional upsurges” (417). Ginsberg’s mixture of visual imagery, conversational prose, pornographic details, and unapologetic anger was a direct rebuke to academic formalism and a forceful announcement that the official conception of modernism was open to challenge. “Poetry,” as Ginsberg explained, “has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don’t understand how it’s made, & the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn’t know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.” Ginsberg’s poetic project to merge art and life was also, as Howl famously demonstrated, a cultural and political challenge to the staid conformity and middle-class numbness he believed was spiritually destroying America. While he followed the New Critics in their concern with the political claims attached to poetry by both liberals and Communists and with their fight against the theoretical arrogance of science, which subordinated human existence to the strictures of categorical claims, Ginsberg, along with an emerging group of modernists who appropriated earlier and more open forms of artistic creation, instituted a cultural revolution of his own.

      The other challenge to high modernism took a more conventional, if not more rigorous, approach in Kenneth Burke’s 1945 masterpiece, A Grammar of Motives, a book that marked both the author’s long struggle with the implications of formalist aesthetics and the emergence of late modernism. In this work, Burke questioned the efficacy and logic of high modernism, not in the name of metaphysics as Ginsberg would, but in the name of communication and rhetorical appeal. Equally disturbed by the will to power inherent within the rationalizing tendencies of modern science and technology, Burke too hoped that the aesthetic might serve as a counterbalance to the excesses of modernity. But he and those artists, writers, and critics who followed in his footsteps or paralleled the theoretical moves he made in that book were unwilling, on the one hand, to limit art to merely a disinterested, formal configuration of poetic elements separate from the interested hands of the artist and the audience and, on the other hand, to reduce art to the dreamlike, self-expressive activities of a poetic seeker in search of some form of holy communion. Burke would have little to do with either Lionel Trilling or Allen Ginsberg. Aesthetics, as Burke began to argue, was a very interested, very socially and communicatively grounded act in which the artist tried to construct a sense of self-identity from the crumbling landscape while simultaneously trying to appeal rhetorically to an often diverse and divisive audience. Burke’s modernism, in this sense, dealt with the complicated dialectic between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, that is, between what the aesthetic act accomplished for the artist in relationship to the social, historical, familial, theological, and psychological grounds from which it emerged and what that act accomplished as a discordant, yet communicative, voice amid the chattering of the audience that consumed it. Art served, Burke asserted, as a form of reconciliation, identification, and courtship between the artist who produced it and the audience to whom it was addressed. Art, in other words, was a rhetorical act.

      Burke did not develop his position on aesthetics very easily. In fact, he began his literary career as a committed participant in the Greenwich Village modernist circles in the 1920s and 1930s, having found the intellectual climate at Columbia University, where he pursued his undergraduate studies, a poor substitute for the rich literary culture downtown. Indeed, Burke’s bohemian credentials were impeccable. A friend of William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, and Alfred Steiglitz, and a contributor to a number of “little magazines” of artistic and political dissent including the Masses, Secession, Broom, the Little Review, and the New Republic, Burke emerged as “something of an aesthete” in the 1920s, once referring to himself “as ‘a Flaubert.’”¹¹¹ His poetry, book reviews, and essays were published widely, and his 1924 collection of fiction, The White Oxen and Other Stories, placed him in the category of writer and critic. He was also editor in the 1920s of the literary journal The Dial, increasing his awareness of the modernist currents in poetry, painting, and theater in the international realm. His early career in the avant-garde was marked by the 1931 publication of a collection of essays, Counter-Statement, which tracked his development as a literary critic. Published the same year as Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, Burke’s book helped introduce high modernist criticism to a broader American audience and announced his early allegiance to formalist circles.