talked about things I could relate to” (Conversations 169). Howl expanded Baraka’s
sense of what was possible to express through poetry.
His early Beat/Village years would fall behind him as moved into The Black Arts
Movement and, later, Marxism. However, those early years would always exert an
influence. Baraka would downplay that influence in years to come with statements such
as “the only aspect I could say of O’Hara and Ginsberg that I could have possibly
appropriated was the kind of openness that I always got from them” (Conversations
170). As far as Baraka was concerned, he had moved beyond those reference points no
later than 1965, the year of publication for “The System of Dante’s Hell. That’s when I
consciously stopped trying to write like people whose work I was around, people like
Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg” (100).
However, while he would de-emphasize those early years, he could never
entirely eliminate their influence; they became one (albeit a powerful one) among many
influences that informed but never dominated his work. The Beats, for Baraka,
represented suggestions and possibilities, available avenues but not absolute
directives. Nonetheless, an examination of the two poems demonstrates a connection
and an influence but not a direct copying.19 Both poems are fairly long. Howl (parts one,
two, and three) is approximately 3,000 words long (about 2,957) and “Somebody”
finishes at well over a thousand words (around 1,179). As first glance, Howl appears to
be the shorter poem but that is because of the extremely long lines that the poem favors
as opposed to the shorter lines of “Somebody.” Both poems are indictments of the
larger status quo of each of their author’s respective environments. Both poems begin
by using the rhetorical device of anaphora (literally “carrying back”) which features the
repeated use of a word or phrase in an initial position in a line of poetry.
Whereas Ginsberg begins almost every line with who in part one, the largest of
the poem’s three sections, to describe the people negatively affected by their
environments, Baraka starts the majority of the lin \