The Prophetic Voice of Allen Ginsberg

In an old creation myth, the androgyne stretches out and folds over itself to create a void in which the universe is born. This image is illuminating when one reflects on the poetic endeavor of Allen Ginsberg during the last thirty years. When the poet speaks of the “poem of life butchered out of their own bodies,” as he does in “Howl,” he signifies something about the creative effort expended in his own poetry and about the struggle of self to articulate a “true philosophy of life.” The ambiguity of the phrase “poem of life” is instructive as well, for it indicates a commitment to art and life as mutually informing categories. As the struggle for articulation is the struggle of the self to assert—or discover in the sense of revealing—its being in the world, the writing of poetry becomes a mode of self-creation. It becomes, in the terminology of existentialism, a “life project.”