In 1956, Allen Ginsberg was thirty years old, working in market research and living in Berkeley, California. Born in New Jersey, the renowned Beat poet-to-be had traveled farther than cross-country to get to California. In 1953, he left New York City, where he had attended Columbia University, stopping first in Washington DC, Miami, Havana, and Guanajuato, Mexico, before arriving in San Francisco in 1954 and moving to Berkeley the following year. The journey gave him an expansive view of the United States, both from within and without, which he channeled into his 1956 poem “America.”

In “America,” Ginsberg excoriated the prevailing political climate while revealing his own beliefs. The poem churns between violent indictment and unapologetic confession — “America when will we end the human war? / Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb”; “America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies / America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.” Jonah Raskin, a biographer of Ginsberg, calls “America” “probably the most effective of the overtly political poems that [Ginsberg] wrote in the wake of Howl.”

Ginsberg had performed “Howl” for the first time just three months earlier, making his public debut in a career that would win him the National Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and an American Book Award. Throughout that time — indeed, from his childhood to his death — the poet was shaped by the politics of the Left.