Iron passageways, cabin lights, Brooklyn across the waters, 8 So I dream nightly of an embarkation, captains, captains, For example, there are at least two references to Whitman’s poetry in this stanza: 7 But regarding more precisely the poem “Siesta in Xbalba And Return to the States”, Ginsberg is making allusions to Walt Whitman, which gives the poem a global new meaning. This led to his vision of social and political democracy as an “adhesiveness” between humans (“the sane, healthy love of man for man” 6), just like Ginsberg noticed in an essay on Walt Whitman, where he depicted him as a “sort of prophet of American Democracy”. This dualism between old and new, “death” and “life” is based, implicitly in Whitman, on a supposedly usual false reading of life. In fact, as an enthusiastic patriot of humanity and of America Whitman had stated: This idea of a wonderful land saved from a downfall is, of course, significant in Whitman’s poetry.

According to John Lardas and his Spenglerian study of Ginsberg’s poetry, this particular poem can be read as “America’s position in the grand scheme of historical cycles” 3 because the very place of Xbalba is both “the Place of Death and the Place of Regenerative Powers” 4 in Mayan mythology. The mention of Uxmal in the poem matches an entry of his personal journals of that time 2 (January 12th, 1954 Uxmal). This poem is composed at a time when Ginsberg was traveling through various cities of Mexico the first part was more precisely composed between Mexico and San Francisco, the second part was composed between Guanajuato and Los Angeles. Satisfying Whitman, concerned With a few Traditions One of the first explicit mentions of Walt Whitman in Ginsberg’s published poetry is to be found in a 1954 poem entitled “Siesta in Xbalba And Return to the States” 1:Ĭritic of horse and mule tanned and bearded The well-known link between Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman comes from both Ginsberg’s readers and Ginsberg himself.

Poems by ginsberg