ABSTRACT
What disturbed Allen Ginsberg in this poem of 1955 is more deep and widespread today. American architecture is about the brilliant but solitary ‘open corridors’ of the emporium, with its ‘aisles full of . . . every delicacy’, more than ever its experience has been reduced to an ‘odyssey in the supermarket’, and more than ever the Whitmanesque America has been lost ‘among ‘blue automobiles parked in driveways’.
