by Chris Alexion, Copyright January 29, 2007, all rights reserved. 326 views
So far we've noticed the similarities and differences between Frost and the major American poets preceding and contemporaneous with him. But what of the poetry that emerged after Frost's death? Has he exerted a tangible influence on postmodern American poets, or does he remain as unique and unclassifiable as before?
Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets represent a significant turn in the course of American literature after 1960. The Beat generation was largely one of protest, in which authors like Ginsberg complained that the "best minds of [their] generation" were being "destroyed by madness."
Ginsberg and his colleagues were rebels–rebels against tradition, against modernism's confidence, against moral and literary constraints. Philosophically, the Beat movement might be compared to postmodernism, which combined trenchant critiques of modernist dogmas with a startling and sometimes painfully naive ignorance of its own dogmatic presuppositions.
Postmodern poetry in these early years was largely an expression of anger, particularly at "the Man"–the corporate/governmental juggernaut that dominated the era of Jim Crow, Watergate, and the Vietnam War. The poets of Ginsberg's generation were, as the 1976 film Network would later put it, "mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore."
The title of Ginsberg's most famous work, Howl, encapsulates this anger. Ginsberg's inaugural performance of his poem, in fact, is said to mark the birth of the Beat movement. Howl, which sounds as though it were meant to be read aloud, rolls angrily off the tongue like a litany from the Spanish Inquisition. Ginsberg denounces the Man and applauds the hippies who
reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed . . . .
Yet it would be naive to view Ginsberg's rebellion solely as some kind of Jeffersonian resistance to injustice. The Beat poets' target was not merely industrial-politico bureaucracy, but the very moral and philosophical fabric that affirmed that art was indeed subject to the boundaries of decency. Can we honestly say that Ginsberg's protest was not at least partly motivated by ethical factors, or lack of them? Given Howl's frequent inclusion of drug abuse, crudely irresponsible sex, and the F-word, Ginsberg clearly had more than capitalism on his mind.
How would Frost have responded to Ginsberg et al.? Frost's later skepticism and coolly ironic voice suggests that he might have seen more than a struggle for justice in the Beat movement. Too, Frost's sarcastic commentary on Darwinism demonstrates that he was not one to follow movements blindly simply because they were popular. Frost might, however, have shared common ground with Ginsberg in his reaction to the oppressiveness of modern materialism, driven by an impersonal Science which is supposed to have all the answers humanity needs. Frost sees through this scientific idol in "Why Wait for Science":
Sarcastic Science, she would like to know,
In her complacent ministry of fear,
How we propose to get away from here
When she has made things so we have to go
Or be wiped out . . . .
Science is viewed here as a cruel mistress who claims to have the answers but is herself part of the problem.
Frost differed even further from the Beat Generation in the startling innocence of his work. Frost was at once a cynic and a farm boy. He could roughly question religion, science, and love; yet he could also run to the pasture to fetch the calf and clear the spring. Not only does Frost succeed in arresting our minds without the exaggerated shock value of Ginsberg's sex talk; he presents us with a positive innocence, innocence every bit as robust and militant as Ginsberg's rebellion. Perhaps no poem demonstrates the American vitality of Frost's innocence more clearly than "Birches":
-----When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them. . . .
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
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