The Vietnam War and Countercultural Activism

Over the course of his career, Ginsberg became known as much for his political activism as for his poetry. In fact, Ginsberg didn’t necessarily see a strong distinction between his poetry and his political activism, and this chapter traces how his political consciousness emerged in the early 1960s at the same time he was developing new kinds of poetics to articulate this political consciousness. During the 1960s, Ginsberg became a central figure in the growing and increasingly visible counterculture. The war in Vietnam was a major catalyst for his embrace of countercultural political activism, and as the 1960s unfolded, he came to see language, the corruption of language, and its bad faith use by politicians and others in power as symptom of a callous, violent American culture that seemed to revel in oppression, self-repression, and in escalating the war. He turned to poetry as a counter to this “black magic language,” notably in poems such as “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and this chapter shows how Ginsberg saw his socially and politically engaged poems of the era as doing the crucially important work of raising or changing consciousness about the war and a host of other social and political issues.