It's no surprise that Allen Ginsberg aligned himself with Walt Whitman in his poem "Howl," as the title page of his book of the same name says: “Unscrew the door locks!” / Unscrew the doors themselves from their uprights! (Ginsberg 1). However, using these lines as a preface to his poetry opens 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 heavy-handed narrative seems to contrast sharply with Whitman's joyous "Song of Myself," its title is indicative of his intentions. One of the most famous lines from “Song of Myself” says: “I, too, am not at all tame. . . . I too am untranslatable, / I make my barbaric yap heard on the roofs of the world” (Whitman 87). When read through the prism of transcendentalism, it becomes clear that Ginsberg's "howl" is actually Ginsberg's "barbaric yawn." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Structurally, Whitman and Ginsberg's poem are very similar. Both rely on couplets with the second line almost always indented, and the intensity builds throughout the poems in moments where the structure is broken and the lines increase in size. They create settings in poetry through seemingly endless lists of descriptions, using often repetitive and parallel syntax. However, while highlighting the similarities between the two works, the mirrored structures also serve to highlight the differences. For example, on the one hand, Whitman admires the environment with stanzas such as "The smoke of my own breath, / Echoes, ripples and buzzing murmurs." » . . . loveroot, / silk thread, crotch and vine, / My breathing and my inspiration. . . . the beating 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 cowered in unshaven rooms in their underwear, burning their money / in trash cans and listening to the Terror through the wall, / who were arrested in their pubis. beards returning via Laredo / with a marijuana belt for New York” (Ginsberg 9). While both intend to describe life as they see it, Ginsberg paints a much darker picture. Ginsberg's pessimism compared to Whitman's optimism, however, does not entirely separate him from all transcendentalist ideology. Despite the fact that Ginsberg finds despair in humanity – in which Whitman finds beauty – he does not directly criticize human beings themselves, particularly those he calls the "finest minds" of his generation (Ginsberg 9 ). Instead, he attacks the societal forces "capitalism, psychiatric institutions, disciplinary mechanisms" that he believes are destroying these people. In this sense, Ginsberg's ideas about life are not far removed from those of Whitman, or even those of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Emerson's transcendentalist manifesto, "The Poet," he writes, "it is the dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly" (Emerson 245). Ginsberg's poetry finds beauty in the "better minds", those otherwise condemned by society at large, while emphasizing the man-made forces that defile them or make them "ugly", in Emerson's words . Whitman acts similarly when aligning himself with socially vilified groups of people: “To.