A Supermarket in California

A Supermarket in California

--> This poem is a homage to Walt Whitman as well as an experimentation with many of the themes that were dominant through out the rest of his career

--> Walt Whitman is mentioned through out the poem as a character within the supermarket

--> This poem is sort of like being with your number one favorite celebrity and stalking other celebrities

--> The poem is also filled with a lot of hidden meanings behind different things that suggests the theme of homosexuality

--> Allen Ginsberg was gay and he also put other gay people into the story like Garcia Lorca

--> The evidence supporting the homosexual theme can be found through out the poem

--> Another big theme that is found within this poem is the fact that Allen Ginsberg was not supportive of the type of change that was occurring within society. Not the change for the better but the parts of this change that brought about materialism and consumerism.

--> The speaker is almost like an outsider in America envisioning all the different things he can purchase and think of Whitman as the lost America 

--> A Supermarket in California is Ginsberg's critique of what American culture has become, consumerist,  and he wishes that America could go back to its old ways before American went shopping for ideas and images

--> Deep down though, Allen Ginsberg knows that America has always been this way

A super market n the 1950s

A supermarket of the 1950's representing material objects that people buy and consume

The blue automobile of the 1950s. The color blue again was mentioned to represent and symbolize innocence. "past blue automobiles in driveways." The past innocence meaning t he innocence that once was in American and doesn't exist anymore.