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    A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"
    A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"
    A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"
    Ebook31 pages48 minutes

    A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535817318
    A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"

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      A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" - Gale

      2

      A Supermarket in California

      Allen Ginsberg

      1955

      Introduction

      Written in 1955, A Supermarket in California appeared the next year in Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg’s controversial and groundbreaking book of verse that is often credited with initiating the Beat movement. Beat is a term coined by writer Jack Kerouac to mean both beat down and beatitude. It was meant to describe the dissatisfaction and spiritual exhaustion of a generation that came of age during the 1940s and 1950s.

      A whimsical, almost comic poem, A Supermarket in California addresses, in a surrealistic fashion, Ginsberg’s own relation to Walt Whitman, the nineteenth-century, American poet considered by many to be the father of modern poetry and one of Ginsberg’s literary idols. As in most of Ginsberg’s poems, the speaker is Ginsberg himself (rather than a poetic persona), and he uses the supermarket as a metaphoric setting for dreaming about the possibilities that America offers and lamenting the country it has instead become.

      One of Ginsberg’s most frequently anthologized shorter poems, A Supermarket in California not only acknowledges Ginsberg’s debt to Whitman’s vision of America as a place of possibility and abundance, but also allows Ginsberg to place himself (more explicitly) in a tradition of gay writers. When Ginsberg writes I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys, he alludes to the homoerotic desire so prevalent in Whitman’s own work. This possibility of being openly gay in America is one of the many opportunities that Whitman’s poetry enabled for

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