Preview

Where Will You Find Inspiration Tonight?

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1076 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Where Will You Find Inspiration Tonight?
Where Will You Find Inspiration Tonight? Strong imagery is a key component to a good poem. A poem without imagery leaves the reader unable to relate to the work, and it’s hard to enjoy a poem that one can’t relate to. “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg is a great example of a poem with a strong sense of imagery. Ginsberg has a way of digging into the senses and making the reader experience the poem, rather than just read it. Interpreting this poem through a formalist lens answers any questions left about the text. The poem begins with “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.” Walt Whitman “was a journalist, wartime nurse, and poet whose poetry captured the pathos and spirituality of the ordinary soldier in the Civil War and reinforced the image of President Lincoln as a Christ like character.” (List, go.galegroup.com) With that in mind, approach this introduction with a formalist view. The image here is a man walking down a back road at night with a confused look upon his face. It’s obvious that this man is searching for something, but that hasn’t been revealed yet. The introduction continues with, “In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!” Here is where he states what he’s searching for: images. He’s a writer who has run out of inspiration. He’s become so exasperated that he’s started wandering down sidestreets with a headache, and eventually, he finds himself in a “neon fruit” supermarket. He specifies “neon fruit” to give you an image of bright inspiration. The introduction concludes with “What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” Rather than Ginsberg suggesting that there are literal wives


Cited: Ginsberg, Allen. “A Supermarket in California.” “Collected Poems 1947-1980.” HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1955. Print. List, Sarah Hilgendorff. "Whitman, Walt." Americans at War. Ed. John P. Resch. Vol. 2: 1816- 1900. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 185-186. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 1 Apr. 2013. "Federico García Lorca." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2013.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Whitman was most likely inspired by the American Civil War, which was the bloodiest war in American history. The Southern states broke from the Union under the name “Confederate States of America” in an attempt to preserve slavery. However, during September…

    • 228 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Another technique Gray uses in his poems is synesthesia. In the poem “The Meatworks” this technique is frequently used to demonstrate why the persona is so repelled by the meatworks and chooses to be the “furthest end from the bellowing sloppy yards”. This technique helps demonstrate the power of imagery by using such powerful words and phrases to impede with you senses. “Arm-thick corkscrew, grinding around inside it, meat or not”. This is an example of the cacophonous phrases used in the poem to create the explicit imagery it holds.…

    • 413 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Talks about a long poem by Ginsberg and how its attacking American values in the 1950’s.…

    • 281 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    He finds himself in “a hungry fatigue”(4), hungry of knowledge and revelations, to fill his particularly shopping list he appeals to this “neon fruit supermarket”. This can be understood as a metaphor of what this society seem it can offer, however when Ginsberg gets deeper he is completely disappointed with what he sees,“What peaches and what penumbras!”(6) talking about the amount of disadvantages of this world in front of the good things. “Whole families shopping / at night!”(6/7), nobody is free of the dynamo of this society that sinks every single person in a hole of darkness, not being allowed to see what is actually happening. At the end of this paragraph we find a reference to Garcia Lorca, spanish poet assassinated because of his political ideas, “and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing / down by the watermelons?”(7/8), seeming surprise of seeing that even the greater defenders of the truth had to pass through that extrange circe where he was submerged…

    • 1685 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The World War ll, Liberty of Congress were sending some of the national treasures to a facility in the Midwest. They were shipping a collection of Walt Whitman's papers, they were sealed in packing so it could be shipped. When all of the collection was returned in October 1944, from Washington, it was…

    • 405 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Folsom, Ed, and Kenneth M. Price. The Walt Whitman Archive. Center For Digital Research, Sept. 2002. Web. 27 Sept. 2013.…

    • 1307 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Global Stratification

    • 1804 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Professors Douglas C. Dacy (Chair), J. K. (2004). Walt Whitman Rostow. Retrieved November 9, 2010, from The University of Texas at Austin- What Starts Here Changes the World: http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2003-2004/memorials/rostow/rostow.html…

    • 1804 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Volume D: Modern Period 1910-1945 (5th Edition) by Paul Lauter, General Editor. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, a division of Cengage Learning, 2006.…

    • 4176 Words
    • 17 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Anthology of American Literature. Ed. McMichael et al. 9th ed. Vol 1. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2007. 281- 298.…

    • 1307 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout the poem, many of the poets’ feelings are presented to the reader, Blumenthal believes that life without marriage is a struggle, and he incorporates this feeling into the poem by using an extended metaphor.…

    • 447 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    An example of this would be lines 34-37 when the waitress describes the indoor environment as, “only another white square waiting to be filled like the desire that fills jail cells, the old arrest that makes me stare out the window.” When I read this in the poem it just painted the image in my mind and reminded me of how I felt when I would be working late night wanting to go home especially when the customers would walk in to order in the last minutes of the restaurant being…

    • 759 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Chicago Analysis

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Imagery played a very important part in the poem because it gave the reader an image in there head of the city and the environment with the people who lived there. The main purpose of this poem is to defend the common theories that are directed toward the city of Chicago. Sandburg talks about the corruption of the city, which shows he is honest about what he says, but also points out the flaws of other cities and their people. He also points out that even though Chicago is corrupt and bad on the outside, it still has good people on the inside. In the first stanza Carl Sandburg gives details about the jobs of the city and the things most noticed about it. The first stanza states the name HOG butcher of the world which gives the person an image of a butcher in the city; it also states toolmakers, Stacker of wheat and railroad workers. The details of the city make you think of a stormy, husky, brawling, city with big shoulders. This all means that the city is windy, full of fighters and destruction. Imagery in the poem state that things are very bright and out spoken in the city but even though the city is seen as dark and evil on the outside it’s people are very bright and filled with happiness.…

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Presented much like a spontaneous journal or diary entry, Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" is a complex and multifaceted poem that stands as an indictment against American government and culture. The opening lines of the poem forward the aforementioned journal-like quality and also present the central focal point of tension in the poem as a whole. The opening line specifically expresses a tone of wistfulness or even sadness: "What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman" (Ginsberg, 1). The evocation of Whitman's name is an obvious symbol of optimism or even idealism. Due to the wide-ranging nature of Whitman's own writings, the sense of idealization is meant to extend to philosophy and politics as well as poetry.…

    • 1713 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    “A Supermarket in California” begins as a man who sets out to find inspiration and companionship, and grows heavier and darker as the poem progresses. Ginsburg conveys the message that people like himself and Whitman are alone because they are part of a minority that went against and questioned the set social norms of his time. He identifies with and tips his hat to Walt Whitman with this poem since he went against the grain during his…

    • 1413 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Initially while reading “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg I couldn’t fully comprehend what it was I was reading at first. My first impression of the poem was something along the lines of, “This man sure knows how to fill up paragraphs with tons of meaningless nonsense that may as well be replaced with a huge ‘NOTHING’ written in its place.” But then I re-read the poem and truly tried to understand what it was he was saying, who were the people he kept bringing up? Why is he talking about food the way he is? The key to understanding this is to know who exactly Whit Whiteman is and what influence he had on Ginsberg, especially because he seems obsessed with him in this poem.…

    • 390 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays