America by Allen Ginsberg

First published: 1956, in Howl and Other Poems, 1956

Type of poem: Verse essay

The Poem

Allen Ginsberg’s “America” presents a sharp critique of American culture delivered by someone who has almost wholly repudiated its values. The poem’s speaker addresses America directly, as if he were delivering a lecture or a sermon to the nation itself, rather than to its people. The nation’s aggressive anticommunist foreign policy and its culture of materialism and conformity are the primary targets of the speaker’s harsh attack.

The poet emphatically denounces America’s Cold War foreign policy. “America when will we end the human war?” he asks in the poem’s fourth line. He follows that question with “Go [expletive] yourself with your atom bomb.” The communists are not this speaker’s enemies. Ginsberg’s speaker informs America that he used to be a communist as a child and is not sorry for it; his mother took him to Communist cell meetings where “the speeches were free” and “everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers.” Now he brags about reading the works of Karl Marx. Near the end of the poem, the speaker satirizes America’s fear of a takeover by the Soviet Union: “America you don’t really want to go to war./ America it’s them bad Russians./ Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians./ The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages./ Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.”

American materialism also comes under attack in “America.” The speaker begins the poem by declaring himself virtually bankrupt: “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing./ America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.” He asks, “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” He wonders when America will send its eggs to India and care for its “millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.” He jokingly asserts that he will make his living composing strophes and selling them as America peddles its Ford automobiles: “$2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe.” He condemns an America economy designed to “turn lathes in precision parts factories.”

In the view of Ginsberg’s speaker, Time magazine represents America’s cultural values. “Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?” he asks. Time magazine is “always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.” The speaker sets himself apart from the culture of Time magazine. “I smoke marijuana every chance I get,” he asserts. “I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closest.” He experiences “mystical visions and cosmic vibrations” and refuses to say the Lord’s Prayer. Ginsberg’s narrator will not join the Army or work in a factory because he is “nearsighted and psychopathic.” His heroes are individuals who lived outside mainstream American culture and suffered for it: the labor leader Tom Moody, imprisoned for murder in 1916 and pardoned twenty-three years later; the socialist activists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed for murder on weak evidence in 1927; and the Scottsboro boys, African American adolescents falsely accused and tried for rape during the 1930’s.

Forms and Devices

Ginsberg delivers his critique of American culture in a rambling seventy-three-line free-verse poem. He eschews rhyme. His poetic ancestor is Walt Whitman, whose free-verse poems first appeared in the 1850’s. Like Whitman, Ginsberg, in most of his poems, presents his message in a series of emotional outbursts, seemingly delivered in a random order. The effect, however, is often prayerlike. In “America,” and in other poems in the Howl collection, the speaker resembles an Old Testament prophet chanting a savage critique of the values of his people.

Ginsberg uses some words not found in the Bible, however. He complains that when he visits Chinatown he gets drunk but “never get[s] laid.” He announces that America’s national resources include “two joints of marijuana” and “millions of genitals.” Ginsberg’s use of such terms in “America” and in other poems included in the Howl collection resulted in federal obscenity charges being brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco, which first published Howl. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, however, successfully defended Howl, and the federal government lost its case in court. By using such language in his poems, Ginsberg was attacking America’s Victorian sexual mores and testing the limits of America’s literary standards. Before the publication of Howl, explicit sexual language rarely appeared in serious literary works. Ginsberg’s use of such language, his rejection of traditional poetic forms, and the sharpness of his critique of American culture partly explain why America’s literary culture, which was dominated by academics during the 1950’s, failed to embrace Ginsberg when Howl was published.

Ginsberg employs both humor and satire in “America.” Some of the humor is self-deprecating: “I’m obsessed by Time Magazine./ I read it every week./ Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore./ I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.” Some of the humor results from puns: “Asia is rising against me./ I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.” Ginsberg’s use of satire is evident in his depiction of Russia as a power-hungry nation intending to “eat us alive,” confiscate Americans’ cars from their driveways, take over Chicago, and transplant automobile plants to Siberia.

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