<P> In Greek mythology, Charon was the ferryman who carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx . The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to experience complete forgetfulness . The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life . </P> <P> In Story Line, Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century--with Civil War and the' triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud and two world wars, mustard gas, and the hydrogen bomb, the advent of the technological era, Vietnam, and IBM ." To Marshall, the poem is meant to show the change from 19th century optimism to the "ennui" portrayed in Ginsberg's poems . Marshall's notion about Ginsberg's portrayal of the evolution of society is shown within the lines, "I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?" In Whitman's day, he would have known the answer to those questions because back then, one would go to the farmer directly to get the products unlike the modern American supermarkets where one does not know where the products come from . </P> <P> Describing the relationship between Ginsberg and Whitman in "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", Byrne R.S. Fone states that sexuality, specifically homosexuality, plays a key role in the poem's presentation of reality: "Not since Whitman had an American homosexual poet dared to intimate, let alone announce, that joy not pain was the result of homosexual rape and to suggest that sex not philosophy might be the most powerful weapon against oppression ." Burns adds that the use of Lorca and Whitman is intended to show the counter-cultural aspects of Ginsberg's art . The poetry of Lorca and Whitman, to Burns, express a value system that contradicts everything the modern supermarket represents . Whereas "love" is what America represents in the works of previous poets, the America of Ginsberg's poetry is best presented through poetical references to "supermarkets and automobiles". </P> <P> Critic Nick Selby, in an essay titled "Queer Shoulders to the Wheel: Whitman, Ginsberg, and a Bisexual Poetics", suggests that the poem presents sexuality as one of several opposing forces in the novel . Selby states that the binary opposites of heterosexuality and homosexuality function in the poem in the same manner as other opposites that make up the major themes of the work: capitalism vs. communism, American vs. Unamerican, and counterculture vs. culture . He adds that Ginsberg ironically uses the setting of the supermarket to show how mainstream culture forces conformity upon the consumer, highlighting the "radical sexuality" of the poet and putting it into a broader social context . </P>

Summary of the poem a supermarket in california by allen ginsberg