BY QUALAN FALOYE
Archive for April 2012
Allan Ginsberg, "Howl" (1955)
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| Poet Allen Ginsberg reads his poem "Howl" outside the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, 1994 |
Allan Ginsberg was an American Poet and one of the leaders of the Beat Generation of the 1950’s. He was opposed to militarism, sexual oppression and materialism. In the poem Howl he appreciates his “hipsters” and takes a stand against capitalism and conformity, which he saw were forces of destruction for this country.
The Poem is comprised of three parts. The Part found in the book Voices of Freedom is just the second part. Part two of Howl is based on the the characterization of Moloch as industrialism. While Ginsberg wrote Howl, he was getting inspiration from using a drug called Peyote. The drug induced hallucinations. These hallucinations made him identify with Moloch. Moloch was an idol in the Bible to whom the Canaanites sacrificed their children.
A Short Analysis
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? (The voice in the poem is blaming a creature that is mythical: A Sphinx, which has the head of a human and the body of a lion. The industrial reference is that its made of Cement and Aluminum.)
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! (Moloch is a representation of the government, which Ginsberg was anti-social authority. Moloch is responsible for everything evil, war and sadness.)
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! (Moloch is a human made entity, but is truly inhumane. It shows no emotion, no sympathy or mercy.)
They Broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! (They were looking in the wrong place for the divine. They thought it could be found in "stuff" (or material objects), when in fact it exists in people.)
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! (Ginsberg was a believed that American capitalism and modern-life had destroyed the ability for people to have visions of hope or reality. Omens, hallucinations, miracles, ecstasies were not part of Moloch. They are good things. But they have been destroyed by Moloch. They have "gone down the American river," which means they were treated like trash, or anything that has no importance.)
"Women Are Hungry"
Let others sing of the hungry pain of Life,
Let others sing of the hungry pain of love,
I will sing of the hungry pain of hunger.
Meridel Le Seur provides a voice to the voiceless in her 1934 works entitled “Women are Hungry.” Le Sueur became the chronicler of women’s lives, often overlooked in accounts of the Great Depression, writing of their experiences in relief agencies and on the breadlines. “Women are Hungry” describes the harsh realities of poverty, starvation, and sexual abuse—of the lives of working-class women during the Depression and their survival by means of supportive friendships and a shared, communal life. In the stories she published in the thirties in such literary magazines as Scribner’s and Partisan Review, Le Sueur wrote treatments of both working- and middle-class women—their experiences of adolescence, marriage, sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, and widowhood.
“The men are gone away from the family; the family is disintegrating; the women are trying to hold it together, because women have most to do with the vivid life of procreation, food, and shelter. Deprived of their participation in that, they are beggars.”
In this literary piece Le Seur gives insight into the lives of women, from different walks of life. With each women having a story to tell, we are introduced to Anna, Anna’s mother, Mrs. Rose, Bernice, Mabel, Nancy, Fran, and Ethel. We become one with these characters as we follow their lives and hear their cries, as they struggle to survive in the face of trying times. For the sake of this presentation, I decided to focus in on two out of four stories. The first is entitled Old and Young Mothers, while the second is Moon Bums.
"Poverty is more personal to [women] than to men. The women looking for jobs of bumming on the road, or that you see waiting for a hand-out from the charities are already mental cases as well as physical ones. A man can always get drunk, or talk to other men, no matter how broken he is in body and spirit; but a women ten to one, will starve alonein a hall bed-room until she id thrown out, and then she will sleep alone in some alley until she is picked up.”
“Old and Young Mothers”
Anna is a cook and supports four people, her mother, sister, and two sons, on $45 a month. Her husband left three years ago to find a job in another city.
Mrs. Rose is an elderly woman who has raised six children whose whereabouts she has not known for four years, since they were out of a job. She tries to support herself by getting jobs as a housekeeper but has a hard time. Either she doesn’t get paid at all or the man tries to sleep with her.
Anna’s mother is a widow who was left to support her children by herself, scrubbing office buildings every night until five-thirty. She sent them all through high school, because in America
“I’ve worked all my life,…with these arms and hands and sent seven children through high school and now I can’t get enough to eat”
Moon Bums
Moon Bums is the vignette of two teenage girls who “had been traveling and mooching around the country for a year and a half” (Le Sueur 325). Fran and Ethel were “old hands”—“Workers kids [who] have graduated from poverty, sweat shops, machines, diets of pigs feet, stale hamburger and old bread” (Le Sueur 325). Before they set out to be on their own, Fran worked in a shirt factory since she was twelve at $ 1.97 for a five hour week, while Ethel went to eight grades in school and then worked as a learner in Connecticut …work[ing] for a dime a week…”(Le Sueur 325). This is the story of the cries of the lost children of the worker who lives hand to mouth.
“To be hungry is different than to count the hungry”.
Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Four Freedoms (1941)
Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Four Freedoms (1941)
The spring of 1939, marked the beginning of World War II in Europe. Most Americans were against the notion of joining the war or even aiding the war. Their country was still suffering from the severe economic depression that had affected them during most of the 1930’s. The American people did not want to deal with other countries problems unless they could solve their own.Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during this time. He had managed to get ma
ny programs of the New Deal passed to help aid the American people but still had not managed to get the country out of the Depression. Joining World War II seemed to be his solution to ending the Great Depression.
ny programs of the New Deal passed to help aid the American people but still had not managed to get the country out of the Depression. Joining World War II seemed to be his solution to ending the Great Depression. If the country was to join the war that meant that the American people would be need to go back to work. Factories would need people to make military equipment and supplies. Large amounts of revenue would be brought to the United States by supplying other European countries that were unable to make their own supplies. The economy and the people of the United States needed this war if they wanted to get back to normalcy.
"I find it unhappily necessary to report that the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders"
How was FDR going to sell his views about World War II to the American people?
FDR gave his annual address to Congress on January 6, 1941. In his speech he mentions the four essential freedoms that were universal to human kind. These freedoms he spoke about would force the American public to reevaluate the very concept of freedom in a democratic society but they would also become FDR favorite statement for Allied Aims.
"In the future days, which we seek to make sure, we look forward to
a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of Speech and expression, everywhere
in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his
own way, everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want which, translated into world
terms,means economic understandings which will secure to every
nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants, everywhere in the
world.
The fourth freedom is from fear, which translated into world terms, means a world-wide
reduction of armaments to such point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in
a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor, anywhere in
the world. "