This poem is split into three parts and it describes an alternative perspective on what it means to be a good American in the 1950’s. Allen Ginsberg is writing from his own personal experience and defies the definition of what “great minds” were in 1950’s America.

According to Ginsberg, he watched as the great minds of America, which he considers to be drug users, drop outs, travelers, musicians, poets etc., were destroyed by “madness”. It is easy to mistake what Ginsberg calls “madness” as the crime and drugs involved in these people’s lives but this “madness” he refers to is actually the oppressive society that we live in.

In Ginsberg’s perspective it is not the drugs or the crime that drove them mad, it is the society which oppressed them and gave them no other way of prospering or surviving besides turning to a life of crime and destruction. Ginsberg points to the fact that minorities were “expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,” (2963). Ginsberg goes on to assert that these people in America were forced to live “waking nightmares” and goes on to prove his point with more than enough evidence.

The first section of the poem deals with who was oppressed by this corrupt system and the second moves onto what exactly oppressed these people. The word “Moloch” is used repeatedly in the second section and in the footnotes it is defined as a, “Semitic god to whom children were sacrificed” (2969). This word is immediately associated with, “Solitude”, “Filth” and “Ugliness” and as the poem goes on it begins to represent bigger issues such as war, government, capitalism and the ways that American society has been corrupted and manipulated to keep the oppressive minority in power.

The third section of this poem is dedicated to a man named Carl Solomon. With a little research it becomes clear that Ginsberg met Carl Solomon at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute, and they became close friends. The last section of the poem is very personal and throughout the entire poem Ginsberg seems to be mentioning these specific instances as if he has assumed the reader will remember the instances he refers to.

The fact that this poem was so personal makes it all the more reliable. There are Ginsberg’s raw and honest emotions during the time that he was alive. There have always been arguments going around that societal corruption does not exist anymore and we have made it to some sort of “promised land”. These arguments are particularly popular in our modern period. This argument is powerful in defusing public motivation to spur social change. This poem serves as proof for the struggle that many Americans face on a daily basis. The American Dream has very much turned into an American Nightmare for a majority of the inhabitants. This poem is extremely relevant in pointing to the fact that oppression is not a scary story that you hear at bedtime, it is real and it is poisonous to our society.

Nobody likes change and it creates fear in the heart of every person. But there must be change if we are to save our country. If we want to survive as a country, if we want to escape this internal hate of diversity, if we want to change the system that has kept minorities silent throughout history, then we must escape the corrupted oppressive system that keeps us all in chains. We must fight every single day of our lives so that we may achieve this ideal of equality and acceptance in American society. It will not be easy, and it will not be quick, but we mustn’t let the elite turn our attention away from the ever-growing need for social change.
No one wants to live in a country of hate and discrimination, no one wants to be known for that. America was built on the ideals of freedom and we must return to this initial goal and expand it in order to accept and acknowledge all of the many diverse peoples who worked to make America great in the first place.