The Dismal Tide by Ben Borhart

“Summary- Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety.” (Bloom 94) Thus Harold Bloom writes in the interchapter entitled “A Manifesto” in his compelling work, The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom’s main focus in the book is the idea of poetic influence, or how earlier poets by necessity influence future poets with their work. A simplification of Bloom’s thesis would be that since we are nearing a full millennium of English verse all truly original topics have been covered; the only way a modern poet can create new material is by, consciously or not, misreading a precursor. To put it a different way, the poet convinces herself no one has previously covered her desired topic.
In the case of comparing “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman to Alan Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”, this “misprision” (as Bloom terms the process) is especially clear. Given the manifold connections between the two poems, Harold Bloom’s theory of influential anxiety works to tie these poems together in a father-son context.

Harold Bloom’s ideas are hard for many to accept, including this author. The assertion of a creative limit is staggeringly hard to swallow, even just considering the giant leaps and bounds that technology has accomplished in the last several decades. Therefore, I cannot say I agree wholly with Bloom’s ideas, but his idea of poems begetting other poems works in this case.

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a great example of the ideas and tropes that Whitman used in most of his poetry. He directly addresses forces of nature (“Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!” (Lauter 2995)), uses repetition for dramatic effect (“It avails not, time nor place-distance avails not” (2995)), and talks to the reader as if s/he were present (“What is it then between us?/ What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?” (2995)).

The themes of the poem are also uniquely Whitman’s; in describing the scene on the ferry, Whitman underscores the universality of human experiences: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, / Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, / Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd” (2995). Whitman enumerates many more such “shared” experiences, glorying in both nature and human industry. Also, Whitman brings the idea of posterity into the work in an interesting way; he claims many times in the poem to have the reader specifically in mind as he is writing: “I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born” (2998).

Strangely enough, at the end of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman addresses his own precursors in a way that Harold Bloom might consider valid. When discussing the “dumb, beautiful ministers” Whitman says that “We use you, and do not cast you aside-we plant you permanently within us,” (2999). This coincides remarkably well with Harold Bloom’s sixth step in poetic influence, which he dubs Apophrades, a term that comes from the Athenian era meaning certain days when the restless dead come back to their homes (Bloom 15). Bloom styles this last stage of influence as a period when the poet no longer fights against precursors but allows herself to “channel” them into their own poetry.

In contrast to Whitman’s idyllic meditation upon humanity and eternity, we have Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”. A much shorter piece (thirty lines to Whitman’s 132), the narration shares the same time-skipping, over-reaching traits that Whitman uses. The tense of the piece shifts often, from present to past to future, with a parenthetical return to the “actual” present, and back to past tense. The action is also limited to one location, in this case a visit to a supermarket compared to Whitman’s journey on a ferry. The last paragraph breaks off the action and focuses rather on the hypothetical relationship between the narrator and Walt Whitman.

Ginsberg turns Whitman’s conceit back onto the great poet by addressing Whitman personally. (Ginsberg 966). Ginsberg also uses a bit of Whitman’s exclamatory diction: “What peaches and penumbras? Whole families shopping at night!” (966). The use of the exclamation points is ironic; there is nothing to exclaim about in a supermarket at night.

Ginsberg describes Whitman as a “[c]hildless, lonely old grubber” (966). By itself, this seems like a simple expansion on popular images of Whitman in his elder years. Harold Bloom, however, gives us a different outlook on this characterization in his chapter on Daemonization, or the Counter-Sublime: “Turning against the precursor’s Sublime, the newly strong poet undergoes Daemonization, a Counter-Sublime whose function suggests the precursor’s weakness. When the [strong poet] is daemonized, his precursor necessarily is humanized…” (Bloom 100). With this view we can see that Ginsberg has respect for Whitman, but in “A Supermarket” the narrartor implicitly has the greater control over the scene, since he alone commands the power to describe the actions and visuals of the setting.

At the end of his poem, Ginsberg does not give Whitman the same high compliment that Whitman gave to his precursors. While bestowing the honoreous titles of “father” and “courage-teacher”, he turns the idea of “ferry” back on itself, giving the reader a bleak outlook on Whitman’s spiritual state: “[W]hat America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?” (Ginsberg 967). The reference to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is readily apparent, but instead of Whitman’s glorious transcendence the reader is confronted with the idea of the ferry being Charon’s boat across Lethe, which suggests the Grecian afterlife of Hades, a dismal, hopeless place where the dead reside. Lethe was also known to have the power of amnesia, where one who drinks of its waters forgets his past life entirely. Ginsberg therefore does not seem to reach the level of Apophrades or at least denies that he does. For him, Whitman is dead, as well as the “America of love”(967) that Ginsberg says Whitman espouses in his poetry.

From a mid-19th Century ferry on the East Coast to a soulless hock-shop in the West; from exuberant praise of all man’s works to a eulogy for a time and innocence that is lost and irrecoverable; from one creative man’s vision to another’s a hundred years later, we see that, while Harold Bloom’s ideas are interesting and applicable, they cannot quite bridge the creative gulf. Ginsberg pays homage to Whitman the poet and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, but this praise by necessity lessens Whitman’s hold over Ginsberg. In many ways, “A Supermarket in California” can be read as a note of farewell, to both an inspiration and a father.



Works Cited


Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Ginsberg, Allen. “A Supermarket in California”.
Perrine’s Literature: Sturcture, Sound, and Sense, 10th ed. Ed. Thomas R. Arp &
Greg Johnson. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009. 966-967.

Whitman, Walt. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”.
The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 2995-2999.