The Crux of Identity: The Poet and the Word by Karin Bergquist

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
(John 1.1)


Since the birth of the written word, poets have struggled to express themselves adequately through language, groping blindly to prescribe words to that which they see, and more difficultly, to the abstract: to that which they feel and experience. The Greek word “Logos,” literally meaning “word,” is the root word of “logic,” or the basis of rational thought. In ancient Greece, the orator was the most revered in his society, for he who chose his words meticulously, passionately, and accurately was a prophetic man of reason (Johnson 175). The poet as a man of the word, and more specifically as the creator and manipulator of the word, assumes a godlike role when he assigns specific words to an abstraction or a physical object. By fixing an experience into words, one inevitably binds that experience exclusively to its descriptors. Thus, the tragedy of the poetic condition is born: does one dare to potentially bastardize the experience by confining it to words, or acknowledge that risk and immortalize the experience despite it? Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg both play curious roles in this unfortunate circumstance. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman indirectly accepts this tragedy, yet almost effortlessly manages to undo it; in “A Supermarket in California” Ginsberg reflects back to Whitman in his attempt to come to terms with the inevitable cross the poet must bear in consciously committing himself to language.

When discussing these poems and their parallels, it is vital to first understand the consequences of choosing to devote oneself to crafting poetry. Because the poet constantly assesses the world around him by scrutinizing and filtering every detail through an artistic and analytical lens, he inadvertently detaches himself from his world. His commitment to the word, nay, obsession with the word yields a peculiar and unavoidable sense of alienation from his peers, despite his irrefutable dependence on his environment for inspiration.

Whitman solidifies this concept through his word choice in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” “Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to / me!” he exclaims, observing the unremarkable bodies mulling around him. “Curious” here implies an irreconcilable strangeness and division between the speaker and his subjects, and by focusing on the fissure, the speaker widens it. Later in the poem, Whitman “…maintains that he, as representative of nineteenth-century man, is ‘one’ with the men of the past and the men who will live [thereafter]” (Gargano 263), yet never associates himself with a contemporary or equal from his time. This further indicates his detachment from the people of his own generation and highlights his acknowledgement of the solitary poetic figures of the past and the future generations.

The speaker’s sense of alienation in “A Supermarket in California” is more accessible, as the entire poem emphasizes the excruciating burden of loneliness. From the offset, the speaker refers to himself as “self-conscious” and fatigued walking alone down alleyways. He begins “shopping for images” in, of all places, a supermarket. The common individual shops for items which provide physical satiation; here, the poet wanders the aisles longing for mental subsistence: an alleviation from the troubling condition that stems from his own lack of inspiration. The poet imagines himself in the company of Walt Whitman, the “childless, lonely old grubber,” and even though they walk together, they still are separate in their “solitary fancy.” This incidental concession on the part of the speaker addresses a certain isolation: even in the imaginative company of another man – another poet – an ineffable barricade still exists. However, the barrier between the speaker and Whitman differs enormously from that which divides the poet from his surroundings.

For the poet, there is no greater adversary than the limitations and consequences of time. Whether he states it explicitly in his work or not, each word, each line, each poem becomes a meditation on inevitability and mortality. A number of literary critiques of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” focus primarily on the immediate, aesthetic aspects of the poem. The imagery in the poem is undeniably significant, such as the fluid, circular movement of the birds, the “pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to / the sea of the ebb-tide,” and the descriptions of the city from a ferry suspended on the water. The extensive use of imagery emphasizes the perpetuation of the physical world beyond the transience of the lives of men. The tide continues to ebb and flow with no regard to the men who look upon it: every life ends and the natural world remains practically unaffected. However, the overwhelmingly aesthetic nature of the poem merely highlights the prominent purpose of the poem. Whitman

warns us that an aesthetic approach alone cannot really touch the essential body of his work. [His] refusal to be judged according to established literary criteria is accompanied by the claim that his [writing] transcends literature…[and] bridges the gap between words and things, aesthetics and ethics, life and fiction (Hagenbuchle 452).
The importance of aesthetics in Whitman’s poem in no way should be called into question, though his imagery merely acts as a vehicle for his greatest and most astounding victory: his transcendence from the physical world and ultimately, his skillful and clever evasion of death.

The poet contends in the fifth section of the poem, “I too had received identity by my body, / That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of / my body”. He admits that the realization of the self must first stem from the physical world, and later confesses his all-too-human fixation with the physical world in the sixth section of the poem. He

Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Played the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

After realizing and coming to terms with the physical nature of the self, the poet then performs his greatest feat. By consistently referring to himself in past tense he sheds his physical identity and replaces it with a more transcendental, spiritual one. He anticipates his future readers, and speaks as if he has already passed away, thereby preemptively accepting death and discarding it simultaneously. As the master and molder of language, he acknowledges the grave consequences of his choice to encapsulate his ideas, yet through his manipulation of words he manages to undergo a metamorphosis. He begins as a man, becomes a man of the word – someone capable of conceiving then manipulating his surroundings – and finally evolves into something sacred: an ageless prophet immortalized by his own pen.

Whitman’s prophetic aphorism becomes a posthumous correspondence with future generations of writers, and thus produces Ginsberg’s melancholy reflection. Whitman, Ginsberg’s “lonely old courage-teacher,” catalyzes the poetic lust in Ginsberg to be more than just an ordinary, arbitrary, blank face in the crowd that scurries towards an inevitable and bleak end. “A Supermarket in California” epitomizes poetic frustration and distress. The poet wanders “in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans / following [Whitman],” winding through aisles of physical objects in search for inspiration, for that which will secure his identity not as a physical object ticking like a time-bomb, but as a transcendent literary figure capable of inspiring further generations. Later in his literary career, Ginsberg arguably achieves this transcendence with “Howl,” a visceral, jarring, and very personal exposure of the tormented writers of the Beat generation. It is through “Howl” – an appropriately titled poem – that Ginsberg screams his way into prophetic existence and achieves his own long-awaited, torturously contemplated immortality.

The beauty of committing oneself to language lies in the idea that the poet has “the unique chance to re-create the world” (Hagenbuchle 430). That world he creates through such hallowed discernment continues to live and inspire long after his body becomes reduced to nothing more than dust. The fact that critics still analyze Whitman and Ginsberg’s works merely solidifies the fact that a poet, if he is lucky, can outlast even the unavoidable conclusion of physical existence. Though his lungs no longer breathe, his words do so in his stead.


Works Cited


Gargano, James W. “Technique in ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’: The Everlasting Moment.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 262-269.

Ginsberg, Allen. “A Supermarket in California.” Perrine’s Literature. Structure, Sound, and Sense. Ed. Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Wadsworth Cengage Learning: Boston, 2009. 966.

Hagenbuchle, Roland. “Whitman’s Unfinished Quest for an American Identity”. ELH: A Journal of Literary History 40.3 1973: 428-478.

The Holy Bible. Oxford Bible Warehouse: New York, 1885.

Johnson, R. "The Poet and the Orator". Classical Philology 54.3 Jul. 1959: 173-176.

Whitman, Walt. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Leaves of Grass. Bantam Books: New York, 1983. 128-132.