As a representative poet of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg has garnered much critical interests in the history of American poetry, but critical attention was usually given to “Howl,” one of the most influential literary works of the 20th century, or “Kaddish,” a touching elegy for his mother. Throughout his career, Ginsberg made reference to the states of American civilization, its barren fields smudged with the wastes of the machinery. This essay, while revisiting his 1955 poem, “Sunflower Sutra” within the frame of ecological imagination, relates the counter-cultural poetics of Ginsberg to eco-criticism. When it comes to exploring the problems of materialized American civilization, “Sunflower Sutra” vividly draws the psycho-geography of bleak American society in the 1950s. I argue that an eco-critical reading of Ginsberg’s poems broadens the scope of the Beat Generation’s counterculture, and that Ginsberg’s urban pastoral drawn in a few poems successfully attains his own goal of re-imagining America in a new vision.
1. 들어가며
2. 해바라기: “달콤한 황금빛 땅”과 증기기관차
3. “경전”과 도시의 목가
4. 글을 나가며
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