Now, that isn’t all that shocking, but it is a comparison and I am making it. Here, there may not only be a clue to the “vibrating plane” origin of Ginsberg’s line, but also a line that could have inspired the title of “Howl.”īoth poems mention suicides. “What living and buried speech is always vibrating here….what howls restrained by decorum,” (158, 159).
This is perhaps a reference to Whitman’s style of writing, and a line within “Song of Myself could be used as corroboration. In “Howl”, Ginsberg writes, “and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,” (I, 73). Long lines, two very long poems, no real rhyme scheme anywhere, and occasional repetition. Just looking at the structure of the poems, without reading any words, allows one to see similarities. He wanted to have the same relationship Whitman had with his birthplace, but he also wanted to record his current version of the United States, which had differed so much from what Whitman described. I feel it is possible that Ginsberg read, and was inspired by, Whitman, and was perhaps flooded with passion and disappointment and hope for the country that he saw in Whitman’s words. I feel that “Song of Myself” is a poem written for and about America, or at least the America that Whitman experienced. “Howl” is, arguably, for and about the America that Ginsberg experienced.
When I was reading Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, I could not help seeing the similarities between this poem and Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl.” It is true that they were written in completely different eras “Song of Myself” was originally written in 1855, and “Howl” was completed about 100 years later, in 1956.
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