In Memory Of Radio - Analysis

The Shadow as a secret god

The poem’s central claim is that old radio—especially The Shadow—offered a kind of dark, thrilling faith that modern pieties can’t replace. Baraka opens by asking who has stopped to think about the divinity of Lamont Cranston, as if a pulp hero deserves the attention usually reserved for saints. That word divinity is both comic and serious: comic because it elevates a radio character, serious because it admits how real that voice felt to listeners. The speaker sets himself apart from the respectable mainstream—those who listened to WCBS and Kate Smith—and names Kerouac as the only fellow worshipper he knows. The poem begins as a joke about taste, then reveals a longing for a vanished kind of intensity.

Mocking the cheap wisdom of “love”

When the poem pivots to What can I say? it starts interrogating the very language people use to sound wise. Baraka riffs on the sentimental proverb better to haved loved and twists it into the absurd alternative of put linoleum in the living room. The humor isn’t just for fun: it exposes how public sayings about love often feel as dead and domestic as flooring. The speaker keeps asking whether he’s a sage, but the question is loaded—he distrusts the role of the comforting moral voice.

False healers, real violence

The poem sharpens its edge by listing public authorities who claim power over souls and bodies. Baraka says he doesn’t have the healing powers of Oral Roberts and can’t do prosperity-salvation like F. J. Sheen. Then, with a jolt, he mentions being unable to order anyone to gaschamber satori like Hitler. That leap from televangelists to extermination collapses the distance between soft spiritual coercion and overt terror: both are forms of control dressed up as revelation. The poem’s tone here is scathing, but also wary—he refuses to pretend he can cure anyone, and he refuses the grand, dangerous posture of the one who knows.

Turning “love” into “evil”

The poem’s most memorable move is its claim that love is an evil word. Baraka literalizes the suspicion: Turn it backwards and you get An evol word, a joke that still lands like an accusation. The pun matters because it captures a real tension: love is supposed to be the safest word in the language, yet the speaker feels it hides manipulation, performance, and risk. He admits he doesn’t understand it and doesn’t want to go out on that kind of limb. Love becomes not a private feeling but a public demand—something people force you to say, believe, or act out.

Saturday morning innocence that still survives

Against that mistrust, Baraka offers a tender memory: Saturday mornings listening to the Red Lantern, and at eleven, Let’s Pretend. The key confession is: & we did—and then, even more vulnerable, I, the poet, still do. That line keeps the poem from becoming pure cynicism. The speaker clings to the imaginative life radio trained in him: a practiced readiness to enter a world of voices, masks, and secrets. The Thank God! that follows is striking because it suggests that pretending—story, performance, voice—is the only belief he can say without embarrassment.

Invisible, safe, and still haunted

The poem returns to The Shadow at the end, but now the hero’s power reads like a survival strategy. Baraka recalls the line after the transformation, when the Shadow is safe and invisible, when the unbelievers can’t throw stones. The radio catchphrase—Who knows what evil—becomes a diagnosis of human interiors: hearts of men as a hiding place for harm. When the speaker insists, O, yes he does twice, it sounds like a chant, but also like insistence against denial. If love is an evil word, it’s because it can be the mask evil uses, the way invisibility can be protection and threat at once.

A troubling question the poem won’t let go

If the Shadow is divinity, what kind of god is he? One who becomes invisible to avoid stones, one who knows the evil in men’s hearts, one who speaks from the dark. The poem seems to suggest that this is the only believable authority left: not a healer, not a preacher, not a sage—just a voice that admits how much danger lives inside the words we’re told to trust.