Apollonian Poets and Angel-Headed Hipsters: Nietzsche and Ginsberg on the Artistic Reconciliation of Structure and Authenticity

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche 

“We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.” – Allen Ginsberg 

When you are affected by art, do you see symmetry, revolt, or both on the page before you? The pieces that have moved historical eyes seem to meld the two to do their work. The Death of Marat is birthed in realism and emotion, but within it you can find a solid adherence structures, not only conventions of painting, but subtle invocations of religion, of the pieta, of sacrifice that subliminally stir and rendered the piece a political homage. What is authenticity, after all, when our entire existence is coded around structures? Religions, schools, jobs – even the most blatant rejections of these institutions acknowledge their existence. In the 19th century, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche urged against the constraints of a moral tradition, against the structures, particularly Christian, that bind society and that the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution years earlier had called into question. The self, he argued, was something to be created. Traditional structures were to be left in our wake, the Will to Power something found within. And yet, where was art in this process? For Nietzsche, it was still something that relied on structure, an aestheticization of our lives that helps us self-fashion our existences by revitalizing our will to live and our perceptions of the world around us. But was this structure a different kind of structure than those institutions he found so grotesque? Artistic conventions like tragedy are, after all, fundamentally connected to historical structures of class and religion passed down from the Greeks to the affluent academics of our own century. So how could such structure in art be reconciled with rejection of structure in society when the two grew in the same historical womb?

Allen Ginsberg, 20th century Beat poet and man of a tradition scorned has a lot to say on the matter. The Beat Generation, poetically characterized by Ginsberg, was a post-World War II literary counterculture movement in America. In the midst of an era of conformity characterized by suburban little boxes and the Organization Man, the philosophy of the Beats is vividly existential. In fact, the movement hinges on an intense yearning for clarity, authenticity, and transcendence. Poetry is something traditional, born in the Greeks, but Ginsberg ate that tradition. As a gay man writing in the fifties, his artistic vision of love rejected the nuclear family. As a counterculture icon enamored with the existential connections brought about by drugs, sex, and other intense experiences, he rejected traditional ideas of what creates meaning. As a political creature railing against the capitalistic conformity that he felt squelched authenticity, he rejected the social structures so cemented in the American world around him. And yet, he wrote poetry. A different kind of poetry, that followed the patterns of speech and breath, but poetry no less – an old artistic form Greek and ancient and boiled with structure. Further, he engages with a superfluidity of structures in his pieces, from his references to religion and cities to his sermon-like delivery style. Not only does he engage it, but he uses it to rail against those self-same structures! Similar to Nietzsche, art pours meaning and beauty (through resistance) back into a world that is discolored by traditions. In his seminal polemic, ‘Howl,’ Allen Ginsberg pulls upon a Nietzschean differentiation between artistic structure and its socio-traditional structural origins and uses the close ties between art and culture to revitalize and refashion our social traditions. In this way, art is to both a method of revaluing life, although Ginsberg’s art involves a more blatant stylistic rejection of convention to do so.

Ginsberg mobilizes a technique similar to Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence and aestheticization of reality, but with more of an emphasis on hyper-authenticity than ‘beauty.’ In his "Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption,” philosopher Lanier Anderson proposes that Nietzsche’s idea of meaning uses form as a mode of redeeming the tragic reality of our lives. In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, this is proposed in the idea of the Dionysian and the Apollonian; that art unifies the irrational and chaotic purity of emotion (Dionysian) under the mantle of aesthetic structure (Apollonian). For him, this is the unification of structure and artistic rebellion, because while the Dionysian aspect is beautiful, the Apollonian aspect allows it to be communicated in a way that can be absorbed by a society that speaks in a language of structures and institutions. Apply this to poetry, and you can see how Ginsberg puts these same tools to work, although his work places more of an emphasis on Dionysian rebellion. The Beats and Ginsberg in particular draw upon the earlier idea that humans are isolated from one another and human experience is absurd. Ginsberg develops meaning in the idea of connections: these are precious, fleeting experiences achieved through intense emotional connections, and the act of fighting against the meaninglessness conveys value and life. For Allen Ginsberg this is conveyed on a practical level more than it is through philosophical treatises. In “Howl”, Ginsberg’s well-known outcry against the destructiveness of society, the long-lined, passionate voice of it strives to communicate authentic emotion felt in the moment and is speech-driven rather than directed by aesthetic form. The very act of the poetic process, which develops the emotions felt by Ginsberg, is the ultimate rebellion against meaninglessness – and thus, delivers meaning. This proposes a distinct place for art in the process of yielding meaning and authenticity in life. Similarly but with more of a sequential focus, the significance of events for Nietzsche hinges on their place in a greater story. Narrative form gives additional significance to the episodes in a life, and art allows us to impose this meaning-lending form upon our lives and ‘redeem’ it. For Nietzsche, this application of form in real life is demonstrated through his thought experiment of eternal recurrence: “The thought of an event’s recurrence not only forces a serious recognition of its relevance to the value of my life, but also opens the possibility of my taking a specific new attitude toward it, which redeems it by changing its import in my life.”[1] In this way, one experiences a catharsis of emotions through the experience allowed by aesthetic form, and this in turn renders life bearable by supplying us with the illusion that life is at least aesthetically tragic if it must be tragic. Ginsberg works in a similar way, using poetry to communicate incredibly intense experiences of the world around us that allows us to then engage with that world in a more authentic way by after reading the poem. Literature and art, thus, are a model for self-fashioning. 

While for Nietzsche this self-fashioning the more individualistic end of survival, Ginsberg takes it a step further, mobilizing the meaning found in poetry to change social traditions. Nietzsche views art as something necessary to survival and quality of life. Without it, we will be hopeless and much less able to face a world that is so depressingly devoid of meaning; art helps revalue our lives. Alexander Nehamas’ book Nietzsche, Life as Literature points out this tendency of projecting a literary model onto life, arguing that Nietzsche’s philosophy of art critically engages aesthetic form to give us life meaning.[2] For Ginsberg, though, the way art affects our lives is a bit different. To Ginsberg, beauty is fundamentally tied up with extremity, and so the hyper-realism intense images and language he utilizes is meant to cause the reader/listener to view the subjects of his poems in a new way when they go back to the ‘real world.’ For instance, the negative, destructive image of Moloch from ‘Howl’ is so vivid that it may always be associated with American capitalism and materialism. In this way, art serves less as a form of beautifying reality as it does of reframing it to something more intense. It also has a political agenda: now I perceive capitalism in the negative light in which Ginsberg portrays it. This is a bit different from the Nietzschean view on art proposed in Birth of Tragedy: “art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming.”[3] Art for Ginsberg transfigures not only our reality and place in it, but also our perspective on that reality (i.e. political views). Poetry is like a really intense acid trip – a moment in time where you experience a particular worldview view intensely, and then after that it changes not only how you look at the world around you, but your view on right and wrong. The implication is that through mobilizing structures such as the biblical Moloch in his poetry, Ginsberg’s style of political poetry has the potential to change social structures such as capitalism over time by altering people’s perspective on them. 

Through his allusions to recognizable elements of social structure such as religion, Ginsberg grounds his rebellious appeal to authenticity within ‘Howl’ in a recognizable framework, allowing him to claim an altered social tradition for the Beats. The poem itself is a reflection on a moment of intense experience for Ginsberg, a drug-induced state in which Sir Francis Duke Hotel in San Francisco appeared as the face of a demon or monster paralleling the freaky image of Moloch. Rather than making this terrifying experience more beautiful by unifying through it through fiercely structured poetic form, the poem delivers a fractured series of images is more aimed at recreating the ecstatic chaoticism of the experience for his readers. This vivid glorification of experience is revealed only a couple lines in: “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry / dynamo in the machinery of the night” shows very existential understanding of meaning.[4] For him it exists in moments of connection that aren’t long lasting but that are tragically beautiful. However, this chaos is grounded by the monolithic character of Moloch. Throughout the poem, this ancient biblical god to whom children were sacrificed appears as a personification of capitalism and grounds all the other images in a single constant: “Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the / stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! / Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!”[5] Ginsberg speaks to the ultimate disillusionment of his generation, where the machinery of a system is prioritized over individuals and where human needs such as love and spirituality are altogether absent. But he calls upon something already created and recognizable to do so. Moloch already has a negative moral connotation from the Bible in which his worship was considered a crime against the Christian God. However, Ginsberg claims this figure for an anti-materialist rant, claiming the structure of moral values for the Beats. The underlying suggestion there is that the Beat counterculture is actually more morally upright than these capitalistic systems that attempt to claim Christianity for themselves but in fact are just as destructive and areligious as the gods of the biblical gentiles. In this way, though Ginsberg doesn’t explicitly call upon religion, his use of Moloch as a structure in the artistic sense claims Christian moral values for the Beats and casts political shade on capitalism. “Unobtainable dollars” speaks to the treadmill, rat-race-like experience of poverty, war, homelessness and literal consumption – both economic, and consumption of humanity by a broken system. While Ginsberg doesn’t stylistically use ‘structure’ as a traditional poet would with rhyme and meter, he still appeals to traditional ‘structures’ through allusion to aestheticize anti-capitalism in a similar way to how Nietzsche says art aestheticizes existence. It is not as directly a way to make life tolerable, but indirectly. Through aestheticizing and moralizing an anti-capitalist agenda, Ginsberg’s art eventually aims to aestheticize existence (just in a longer-term struggle than Nietzsche) by changing how people perceive materialistic American culture. In this sense, this sort of stylistically different but culturally grounded art is more ideal for political art because it demonstrates a need for change instead of stasis. 

Ginsberg’s voice-driven style in ‘Howl’ physically represents his focus on authenticity and stylistic rejection of convention; at the same time, it mirrors the Nietzschean parable of the madman rebelling against structures of society to progress society. ‘Howl’ embraces a free-verse poetic style with a single stanza of dense, long verses that follow no particular set rhyme scheme or meter. That is not to say they are without any structure – they are visually regular though prose-like, and contain subtleties discussed in a moment – but it is not of the traditional style like say a sonnet, nor does it adhere to a single set of rules throughout. That is because rather than the words and voice of the poem yielding to a rigorous aesthetic structure, the structure instead bends to follow the voice of the poem. In its long-lined beauty, the poem is designed as a piece to be performed or delivered orally. Its chant style creates almost a literal howl. The internal rhymes, assonance and consonance in particular perform small amounts of structure self-contained within individual lines, but these structures are based around the authentic emotion when the poem is spoken aloud. For instance, the following verse contains a multitude of subtle internal sound parallels: “…and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the / suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that / shivered the cities down to the last radio.”[6] Bookended by R’s, this little vignette of a few lines demonstrates the almost sing-song, beat-held effect of resemblance and relationship between sounds throughout the piece. This allows the piece to self-contain its own rebelliousness in a shocking synthesis of minute structures bending to an over-arching loyalty to authentically replicating the voice of the experience. This is very similar to the Nietzschean idea found in the parable of the madman in The Gay Science. In this story, the madman tells of how god has died in an urgent message to reveal truth to a society where truth is difficult to come by. To Nietzsche, progress is only possible through new ideas that come in rebellion against the old, but people who have these new ideas are seen as madmen.[7]Ginsberg’s structure embraces this madness and the value of new perspectives (e.g. a negative perspective on American materialistic culture) in the rebellious stylistic elements of his poem. However, some aspects of the poem, such as the long-line style, seem almost deliberate calls on tradition – perhaps in irony, perhaps to engage the structures. In the biblical reference “eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani” (“my god my god, why have you forsaken me”) Ginsberg makes a direct reference to the biblical long-line style that influenced ‘Howl,’ along with Whitman’s similar long-verse poems. Repetition throughout the poem cements this, often referring at the beginning of lines to a ‘who’ that is often unspecified except in the Moloch section, which exemplifies the desperate voice of the poem: “Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long / streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factoriesdream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose / smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!”[8] The reflection on Moloch seems to begin as a the peyote vision of a demon being the buildings of the city, but quickly morphs to encompass a mindset of conformity, consumerist materialism, and capitalism that starts within everyone. This is where the structure follows the voice, allowing the exclamation-jaded sentences to be introduced by Moloch and giving the feel of an angry tirade on him. While the line breaks occur in the middle of sentences, the latter two are indented, so priority is still given to the addressal of Moloch over other parts of the phrases. The repetition of S throughout these lines is so violent it gives the sound almost of spitting as the piece is recited, so that the anger and frustration is carried through to the phonetic choices. In a stylistic manifestation of the frustrations with tradition that Nietzsche vocalizes, Ginsberg weaves a fascinating tapestry of detail and voice-oriented stylistic effects that give the piece the authentic and painful tone it carries when delivered aloud.

Ginsberg delivers his poem with the style and tone of a sermon, but with a secular subject, solidifying the piece as politically revolutionary but also securing it within the frameworks of social structures. In a reading of ‘Howl’ in 1959, Ginsberg delivers lines that begin with emphasis and then carry without particular fluctuation or pause through line breaks (on indented sections) and passing for emphasis over particular words (often to emphasize consonance) or at line breaks before a non-indented line. There are also pauses before the superfluidity of anaphora, particularly the word ‘who’ that begins many verses, which is also reminiscent of the sermon style: “[beat] who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, [half beat] burning their money in wastebaskets [quarter beat] and listening / to the Terror through the wall…”[9] The tone of these verses is often monochromatic with dramatic pauses that decrease in length, giving the feel of a desperately ecstatic sermon. Artistically the poem then becomes more a revealing conversation of the enlightenment the speaker has felt over a drug-induced disillusionment with the state of society and the individual mind, and its artistic value becomes its ability to effectively communicate the ecstatic understanding achieved in that moment and encourage the listener to experience it as well. This urgency of sharing is reflected in the timing for breaths in the following section, which includes a full line of one non-indented and two following indented lines: “yacketayakking [beat] screaming [beat] vomiting [beat] whispering facts [half beat] and memories [half beat] and anecdotes / [half beat] and eyeball kicks [half beat] and shocks of hospitals [quarter beat] and jails [quarter beat] and wars.”[10] Throughout this the urgency builds through the shortening of intervals paused for emphasis between sections. Further, the longer pauses place emphasis on the negative actions in the first line, and a transition to modes of policing people and reducing freedom. While not explicitly religious, the significance of spirituality to Ginsberg and the spirituality of his poetic message is clear in his sermonic style. The poem is a howl, as the name suggests, but also a sermon to the children of an America whose god is really a Moloch of corporate conformity and greed. This need for truth and brilliant madness in a world of traditional staleness of thought is particularly Nietzschean, although with even more of an allowance for a type of spirituality than Nietzsche. Spirituality is just another tool for using art to revitalize life by raising awareness for the grotesque truths of our societal traditions.

Nietzsche’s vision for art as the redemption of our existence finds political actualization in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg finds a way to alter the idea of art revitalizing reality for a less aesthetic and more pragmatic end: changing perspectives on important social issues. In this way, perhaps Ginsberg shows us something important about political art, that it combines the best of stylistic originality and a groundedness in recognizable realities so that it is not so disconnected that people cannot connect to it. This opens, of course, the question of whether political art is really art – if Ginsberg’s poetry has an ‘agenda,’ is it really art? This is a good question, and I wonder what Nietzsche would have to say about it considering his emphasis on beauty in art. However, I would argue that it is art, on the basis that the voice-based polemic is firstly an expression of immediate and authentic feeling being communicated in an ultimately artistic way. Though it rejects many elements of traditional form, Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ has undebatable mastery over those spoken structures that lend beauty to speech such as internal rhyme and assonance. Its political nature seems a necessity; humans being necessarily political beings because of their place in a politicized society. This is also why Ginsberg doesn’t fully reject structure, despite his literal howl against the system. He realizes that to reject structure entirely would be impossible, because you cannot change without speaking to people on terms that they can understand. To deny the structures in place such as religion would be not only useless but a denial of truth. And for Ginsberg and Nietzsche, art is the ultimate an expression of truth and authenticity; thus, structure is claimed to fight structure, and tradition is overturned.

 Notes

[1] R. L. Anderson, "Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption,” European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (08, 2005): 200, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/nietzsche-on-truth-illusion-redemption/docview/43143979/se-2?accountid=14026. Accessed May 1, 2021.

[2] Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. 

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 24, 140.

[4] Allen Ginsberg, “Howl by Allen Ginsberg,” Poetry Foundation (Poetry Foundation), accessed May 25, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 181-182.

[8] Allen Ginsberg, “Howl.”

[9] Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” Spotify, 01:33-01:39, Accessed May 25, 2021, https://open.spotify.com/track/2sSHtceOBuK9y63ruNK9r0?si=YX6I3yBGTA2xpd8OcWZE0w.

[10] Ibid., 03:23-03:31.

Bibliography

Secondary Sources

Anderson, R. L. "Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption." European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (08, 2005): 185-225. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/nietzsche-on-truth-illusion-redemption/docview/43143979/se-2?accountid=14026. Accessed May 1, 2021.

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche, Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.  

Jackson, Brian. "Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52, no. 3 (2010): 298-323. Accessed May 6, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40928069.

Primary Sources

Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl. 

Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Spotify. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/track/2sSHtceOBuK9y63ruNK9r0?si=YX6I3yBGTA2xpd8OcWZE0w.

Ginsberg, Allen, Anne Waldman, and Bill Belmont. 1998. Howl and other poems. Berkeley, CA: Fantasy Records.

Ginsberg, Allen, Barry Miles, and Carl Solomon. 1986. Howl: original draft facsimile, transcript & variant versions, fully annotated by author, with contemporaneous correspondence, account of first public reading, legal skirmishes, precursor texts & bibliography. New York: Harper & Row.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2000. The Birth of Tragedy. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://search-ebscohost-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=56036&site=ehost-live.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 1882, 1887. Walter Kaufmann ed.