Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Charles Harper Webb’s "Invocation to Allen as the Muse Euterpe" is a sprawling, self-lacerating, and deeply ironic plea for poetic transcendence, framed as an address to Allen Ginsberg, the Beat icon who embodied fearless expression, radical openness, and an almost shameless embrace of human frailty. The poem functions as both homage and self-excoriation, blending reverence with comic irreverence, as Webb seeks from Ginsberg the very qualities he believes himself to lack: authenticity, unfiltered passion, and a willingness to strip himself bare before the world.

The title positions Ginsberg as Euterpe, the Greek Muse of lyric poetry and music, though Webb is quick to hedge his invocation, suggesting that Ginsberg might appear as Erato (Muse of love poetry), Polyhymnia (Muse of sacred song), or Calliope (Muse of epic poetry and mother of Orpheus). This humorous excess reveals the speaker’s anxiety—he does not simply seek inspiration but rather demands an overwhelming, all-consuming poetic presence. Ginsberg is welcomed in any guise, whether as a professorial poet-laureate, a circus ringleader, or an unhinged prophet screaming into a microphone.

From the outset, Webb’s tone is both admiring and irreverent: "Come from the fifties, your best years, reeking of reefer and whiskey, gism and sweaty underwear." There is an implicit tension here—Ginsberg’s countercultural freedom, his joyful embrace of sexuality and mind-altering substances, is something Webb seems to admire but also hold at arm’s length. This becomes more evident as the poem unfolds. Webb confesses his own failures, framing them against Ginsberg’s life: "Help me celebrate my failings, to admit how much it hurts to be barely five-seven—I who dreamed of being six-foot-three." The insecurity is almost comic, exaggerated to absurdity, but it also speaks to a deeper longing to transcend the limits of the self.

Ginsberg’s complicated relationships—with his mother, Naomi, with his Beat contemporaries, with lovers like Neal Cassady—become mirrors for Webb’s own shortcomings. He recalls how Ginsberg committed Naomi to Pilgrim State Hospital, authorized her lobotomy, and later wrote "Kaddish" in her memory. This leads Webb to a confession of his own failings as a son: "Help me admit that I abandoned my parents when they got too sick and old and floated out of their right minds." The starkness of the admission—"I dumped them—Dad, then Mom—on my sister"—is undercut by his rationalization: "and blamed my strenuous schedule, my happening life: teaching, doing therapy, re-marrying, and of course writing poetry." The list is wryly self-aware, a litany of modern responsibilities that serve as convenient excuses for emotional neglect.

Ginsberg’s radical honesty about sexuality is another point of discomfort. Webb references the Playboy interview in which Ginsberg extolled "the joys of buggery," but Webb himself admits, "I don’t like embracing men," calling it "the hard bear hug, the forced heartiness" of a straight man performing openness. This ambivalence about masculinity and physicality, his preference for "the usual skulls and skeletons" over bodily intimacy, underscores the contrast between himself and Ginsberg, who was "really, truly gay—telling a thousand college kids about your lips against a black policeman’s chest, begging ?Please Master.?” This moment, recollected from Ginsberg’s infamous performance of "Please Master," is transformative for Webb. Ginsberg’s shamelessness—his "bare, pudgy, queer soul"—becomes a symbol of radical freedom, the very thing Webb both fears and desires.

Webb’s poetic persona here is drenched in self-deprecation. He frames himself as a failed poet, "in my fifth decade, without a major book," too timid, too constrained by fear and bourgeois respectability. His complaints range from existential (his lack of poetic greatness) to mundane (his prostate biopsy, his height), but all point to the same underlying frustration: a sense of being trapped within himself. Even his activism is called into question: "Help me to be more than just me. Help me admit in raving holy poetry that I protested Vietnam not because of my high morals; because I was scared to go." Webb’s brutal honesty about cowardice and self-interest marks one of the poem’s most striking moments, a confession that cuts through the rhetorical flourishes.

The poem’s final movement recalls the moment Webb first saw Ginsberg in 1970, "thumbnailing your harmonium, braying in your love-fest hippie-beaded tuneless voice, leaping around, an awkward, shameless spaz." The language is mocking yet affectionate, recognizing Ginsberg’s unselfconscious embrace of joy. This moment becomes epiphanic—"I knew if you could face the world that way... then anything was possible, even for me." The poem closes not with resolution but with the possibility of transformation, the lingering hope that Ginsberg’s spirit might yet grant Webb the courage to write, to confess, to be fully himself.

"Invocation to Allen as the Muse Euterpe" is a raw, humorous, and ultimately moving exploration of poetic inadequacy, masculinity, and self-exposure. Webb’s language is rough-edged, often crude, but intentionally so—his invocations are laced with irony, recognizing the absurdity of seeking artistic salvation from a dead Beat poet. Yet beneath the humor and self-mockery lies a genuine yearning. Webb’s confession that he lacks heart, that he fears both failure and true expression, is the poem’s core revelation. In calling upon Ginsberg, he is not merely asking for inspiration but for permission—to be vulnerable, to embrace his flaws, and, finally, to write with the reckless, uncompromising honesty that made Ginsberg an icon.

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