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LANGUAGES

There are no handles upon a language

Whereby men take hold of it

And mark it with signs for its remembrance.

It is a river, this language,

Once in a thousand years

Breaking a new course

Changing its way to the ocean.

It is mountain effluvia

Moving to valleys

And from nation to nation

Crossing borders and mixing.

Languages die like rivers.

Words wrapped round your tongue today

And broken to shape of thought

Between your teeth and lips speaking

Now and today

Shall be faded hieroglyphics

Ten thousand years from now.

Sing – and singing – remember

Your song dies and changes

And is not here to-morrow

Any more than the wind

Blowing ten thousand years ago.

Sandburg also created his own fairy-tale world, the Rootabaga Country, with its Zigzag Railroad and the Village of Liver-and-onions. These fairy-tales are truly poetical, like this one which is about The Two Skyscrapers Who Decided to have a Child: "Two skyscrapers stood across the street from each other in the Village of Liver-and-Onions. In the daylight when the streets poured full of people buying and selling, these two skyscrapers talked with each other the same as mountains talk.

In the night time when all the people buying and selling were gone home and there were only policemen and taxicab drivers on the streets, in the night when a mist crept up the streets and threw a purple and grey wrapper over everything, in the night when the stars and the sky shook out sheets of purple and grey mist down over the town, then the two skyscrapers leaned toward each other and whispered…"

The 1950s saw a new demand for free verse. The Beatink Revolution needed fresher rhythms which should be primary a kind of a performance, a happening. This poetry was intended not to be read but to be shouted in coffee houses, with jazz in the background. Clearly, Howl (1956) by Allen Ginsberg (1926—1996) was written to be recited aloud in a coffee house:

I saw he best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

Dragging themselves though the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix…

Ginsberg is often called a modern Walt Whitman, because he uses free form poetry to praise the free life-style. His poetry almost always has a message: defending drug-taking ("a fix") and homosexuality or attacking American politics. He was the most popular poet in the 1950s and 1960s. He often said his teachers were Blake and Dostoevsky. He also referred to Vladimir Mayakovsky as the one whose poetry had an impact on his own. Ginsberg had an enormous influence on the youth and the counterculture of the world.