Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg: 'People keep seeing destruction or rebellion in Jack's writing, and Howl, but that is a very minor element, actually; it only seems to be so to people who have accepted standard American values as permanent. What we are saying is that these values are not really standard nor permanent, and we are in a sense I think ahead of the times... When you have a whole economy involved in some version of moneymaking -- this just is no standard of values. That it seems to offer a temporary security may be enough to keep people slaving for it. But meanwhile it destroys real value. And it ultimately breaks down. Whitman long ago complained that unless the material power of America were leavened by some kind of spiritual infusion we would wind up among the "fabled damned". It seems we're approching that state as far as I can see. Only way out is individuals taking responsibility and saying what they actually feel -- which is an enormous human achievement in any society. That's just what we as a "group" have been trying to do. To class that as some form of "rebellion" in the kind of college-bred social worker doubletalk... misses the huge awful point.'
Nov. 30, 1957.

Fragment uit Howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed bymadness, 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 starry dynamo in themachinery of night,who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and highsat up smoking in the supernatural darkness ofcold-water flats floating across the tops of citiescontemplating jazz,who bared their brains to Heaven under the El andsaw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-ment roofs illuminated,who passed through universities with radiant cooleyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedyamong the scholars of war,who were expelled from the academies for crazy &publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-ing their money in wastebaskets and listeningto the Terror through the wall,who got busted in their pubic beards returning throughLaredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine inParadise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after nightwith dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-cohol and cock and endless balls,

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