Monday, November 24, 2008

"Genitalia=Commerce and Enterprise"/Allen Ginsberg's annotations to the "Waste Land"

During my graduate class on modern American poetry, I proposed the possibility that Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" was a response, at least in part, to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." And now this little bit of archival research has suggested that Ginsberg has Moloch on his mind while combing through his 1936 edition of Eliot in 1950, around five years before "Howl" was published.