It is no surprise that Allen Ginsberg sided with Walt Whitman in his poem “Howl,” as the title page of his book of the same name states, “Take the locks off the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from the jambs!” (Ginsberg 1). However, using these lines as a preface to his poem opens up the question: Is Ginsberg trying to contribute to the transcendentalist movement that Whitman helped define, or is he trying to challenge it? Although Ginsberg's weighty narrative seems in stark contrast to Whitman's joyful “Song of Myself,” its title is a clear clue to his intentions. One of the most famous lines in “Song of Myself” goes: “I'm not tamed at all either. . . . I too am untranslatable, / I make my barbaric bark ring across the roofs of the world” (Whitman 87). When read through the lens of Transcendentalism, it becomes clear that Ginsberg's “Howl” is actually his “barbaric rip-off.” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Structurally, Whitman's poetry and Ginsberg's are very similar. Both are based on couplets with the second line almost always indented, and the intensity increases throughout the poems at moments when the structure is broken and the lines increase in size. They create settings in the poem through seemingly endless lists of descriptions, using often repetitive and parallel syntax. However, while on the one hand they underline the similarities between the two works, the mirrored structures also have the function of highlighting the differences. For example, on the one hand Whitman admires the environment with lines such as: “The smoke of my own breath, / Echoes, ripples and humming whispers. . . . root of love, / silk thread, horse and vine, / my breathing and inspiration. . . . the beat of my heart / . . . . the passage of blood and air through my lungs” (Whitman 27). On the other hand, Ginsberg opens his poem with descriptions that focus on tragedy and deterioration: “who huddled in rooms unshaven, in underwear, burning their money / in wastepaper baskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, / who were caught in the pubic beards returning from Laredo / with a belt of marijuana for New York” (Ginsberg 9). While both intend to describe life as they see it, Ginsberg paints a much more clouded picture. Ginsberg's pessimism in relation to Whitman's optimism does not entirely separate him from all transcendentalist ideology, however. Despite the fact that Ginsberg finds despair in humanity – which Whitman finds beauty in – he is not directly criticizing human beings themselves, particularly those he calls the “best minds” of his generation (Ginsberg 9). Instead, he is attacked by the social forces "capitalism, mental institutions, disciplinary machinery" that he believes destroy these people. In this sense, Ginsberg's ideas about life are not too far from those of Whitman, or even those of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Emerson's transcendentalist manifesto, “The Poet,” he writes, “it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly” (Emerson 245). Ginsberg's poetry finds beauty in the “best minds,” those otherwise condemned by society as a whole, while highlighting the man-made forces that taint them, or make them “ugly” in Emerson's words. Whitman acts similarly when siding with groups of socially evil people: “Through me many voices long silent, / Voices of endless generations of slaves, / Voices of prostitutes and deformed people, / Voices of the sick and desperate, and of thieves and / dwarves” (Whitman 50). Neither poet blames the man himself for his.