Whitman’s “I” remains the unfazed observer, looking closely, absorbing the good and the bad, the adulteries and the emergencies and the hidden lusts, reporting them, and then moving on. and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles.” Ginsberg’s poem is a mid-twentieth-century extension of Whitman’s catalog, still finding poetry in the most unlikely urban places.
#Ilift reveal crowd groan windows
Howl laid out just what happened when all those restrained howls finally burst through the veneer of decorum, releasing those “who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street.
When Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s read the line that ends “what howls restrained by decorum,” he discovered the origin of Howl, his poem that defined the Beat Generation.
#Ilift reveal crowd groan full
The wild variety of city sounds-blab and sluff and clank and clinking and hurrahs and flappings and echoes and groans and exclamations-meld into a cacophonous urban music, becoming the “living and buried speech” that is “always vibrating here.” This is Whitman’s version of what James Joyce would call “epiphanies” or of William Carlos Williams’ belief that “poetry exists in the very language to which we have been listening all our lives.” Just listen to the city streets, Whitman says, and you will hear the full range of human emotions, from the “groans” of those who have eaten too much to the groans of those who are “half-starved.” The city compresses all human experience into a tight, noisy space, and its sounds always vibrate with meaning. He hears the “sluff of boot-soles,” as he employs the informal spelling of “slough,” using it to mean “plodding through mud” but also capturing the sound of all those shuffling boots. In these catalogs, we hear Whitman at his slangy best, as he records the incessant noise of the urbanscape, as if the pavement itself is blabbing away, talking nonstop, saying indeterminate things. The pace of the poem picks up as Whitman gives us his first urban catalog, each line capturing a different sound and movement of the city. Are these scenes related? Is there a kind of narrative implied (is this baby that the poet sees perhaps the result of the young couple giving in to their sexual desires, and is the suicide the result of the young woman’s shame?), or are these just three unrelated scenes of different stages of life, as the poet observes the joys and horrors that take place somewhere around us every minute of every day?
Just as in the previous section he was claiming to be a voyeur, with his gaze penetrating through our clothes to our bodies, so here he lifts the cover from a baby to gaze upon it, casually shooing away the flies he gets a kind of bird’s-eye view of a young couple about to make love in the bushes and he observes and describes a suicide in a bedroom. He observes a scene of birth and one of death, with a lusty love scene in between. Now the tone of the poem quiets in a very unsettling way, as Whitman’s “I” simply stands aside and observes.
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