“A Supermarket in California” is a poem of nostalgia for “the lost America of love” as well as a tribute to Ginsberg’s acknowledged spiritual father, Walt Whitman. It is the poem of someone who loves the United States of America but -for this same reason- feels that his contemporary country is not what could have been. In reaction to this, the poem attempts to bring Whitman’s America to the present, but the result is absurdity. This essay will analyze Ginsberg’s poem focusing on its aspects as a criticism of the American society of the 1950s. For this purpose, Ginsberg’s perspective will be compared with Walt Whitman’s more positive vision of America one hundred years before. Taking into account the results of this contrastive approach, the essay will study Whitman’s role in the poem acting as a contrast that emphasizes the strangeness, the unnatural aspects of the society which is therein presented, thus favoring an alternative, more distant perspective.