Allen Ginsberg’s three-part poem “Howl,” is an exclamation of utter frustration, fueled by the individuality-shattering, conformity of his time. It is a heartfelt tribute to his fellow angelheaded hipsters, the “best minds” of his generation, “destroyed by madness.” It is the identification and calling out of Moloch: the source of this devastating ailment afflicted upon individuals during the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, it is a notion of sympathy and unity, addressed to Carl Solomon, the recipient of the poem’s dedication. Ginsberg’s “Howl” synthesizes and summarizes the Beat Generation’s outright rejection of societal mores and expectations, through the medium of free verse, dithyrambic poetry.
Part one catalogues the actions and experiences of the Beatniks. This group of artists refused to conform to what was socially acceptable. Rather than live their lives in “little boxes,” as described by Malvina
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Reynolds in reference to Levittown, they actively pursued a life of individual expression and acted in a way that satisfied their own desires. In terms of sexuality, both hetero and homo, Ginsberg embraces, accepts, and proclaims these actions. This was a group, “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.” Similarly, drugs are approached in the same nonchalant manner. Knowledge of illicit and psychedelic drugs was not commonplace, nor was it discussed among the public; Ginsberg, however, openly tells of their usage and impact on his generation. His people, “got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,” and dragged “themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” Possessing a dual purpose, this behavior provided enjoyment to the participants and acted as a simultaneous form of rebellion. Although looked down upon by society, Ginsberg views these individuals and their actions as the brightest of the time. Part two acknowledges the source of destruction within Ginsberg’s generation.
By utilizing an anaphora, the name “Moloch,” is forced upon the reader. Moloch, an idolized god of the Hebrew Bible, was known to sacrifice children. Ginsberg views the modern Moloch as a type of machine, or system that contributes to the destruction of youth. Moloch’s mind is, “pure machinery,” his blood is “running money,” and “fingers are ten armies.” Moloch is the industrialized, conforming, militaristic, and capitalistic America; the country’s zeitgeist is slaughtering the youth.
Finally, part three is a direct message to Carl Solomon: one of Ginsberg’s acquaintances from his time spent at the Psychiatric Institute of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Ginsberg writes of Solomon’s insanity, pain, and suffering, stating, “where you’re madder than I am,” “where you scream in a straightjacket,” and “where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again.” Solomon is a direct example of Ginsberg’s angelheaded hipsters, driven to madness, rejected, and outcast by
society. “Howl,” is Ginsberg’s expression of his disgust towards the destruction of his fellow, beautiful minds, by the suppressive society of his time; which forced an entire generation into insanity. While Ginsberg writes solely about the mid-twentieth century, this notion is applied to both before and after his time. Reflected by past authors, such as Walt Whitman, and even visible in today’s society, individuals are under the constant, suffocating notion to conform to one path in life, and to suppress their individuality. Ginsberg outright rejects this absurdity and urges the reader to do the same. Rather than allow Moloch to control our lives, we need to live for ourselves.
The "Poet of the New Violence" On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. 29-31.
Throughout the words and the lives of the Beat Generation, one theme is apparent: America, everywhere from Allen Ginsberg’s “America,” to Jack Kerouac’s love for Thomas Wolfe. Although the views of America differ, they all find some reason to focus in on this land. Ginsberg, in his poem “America,” makes a point that not many of us can see as obvious: “It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again.” Each and every one of us make up America, and when we complain about something that is wrong, we are complaining about ourselves. Being raised by his mother as a Communist, and being homosexual, Ginsberg found many things wrong with America, and he does his fare share of complaining, but at the end he decides, “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” Ginsberg didn’t want to sit and watch everything go wrong. He was going to do something, despite the fact that he was not the ideal American.
Homosexuality remained illegal in most parts of America until the 1960s, but Ginsberg refused to equate his Gay identity with criminality. He wrote about his homosexuality in almost every poem that he wrote, most specifically in ‘Many Loves’ (1956) and ‘Please Master’ (1968), his paeans to his errant lover Neal Cassady. Ginsberg’s poems are full of explicit sexual detail and scatological humour, but the inclusion of such details should not be interpreted as a childish attempt to incense the prudish and the square.
Throughout their fun and crazy adventure, they realize more what the world has to offer, opening their realistic minds. At this part of the poem, he begins to sound frustrated, confused, questioning the status quo. By line 65 and beyond, he begins talking about the time he spent in a psychiatric ward. Ginsberg wants people to know that someone like him, whose mind wandered over life’s truths, ends up at a madhouse. Why? Because he practiced Dadaism, a artistic art movement that opposed social, political, and cultural values, when he threw potato salad at a professor in CCNY. At this psychiatric ward, he was introduced to many therapies such as ping pong, shock therapy, and hydrotherapy. Also, his close friend, Carl Solomon, and Ginsberg’s mother was in a psychiatric ward, blamed for their insanity. For this, Ginsberg grew angry at
A movement arose among the artists of 1950s America as a reaction to the time's prevailing conformity and affluence whose members attempted to extract all they could from life, often in a strikingly self-destructive way. Specifically, the Beat writers and jazz musicians of the era found escape from society in drugs and fast living. But what exactly led so many to this dangerous path? Why did they choose drugs and speed to implement their rebellion? A preliminary look at the contradictions that prevailed in 1950s American society may give some insight into these artists' world.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” The opening lines of Howl, by Allan Ginsberg, melodiously encapsulates the beat generation. The beats alluded to by the verbatim ,“The best minds”, are a group of idiosyncratic poets whom through the instrument of prose(driven by spontaneity and a primal lifestyle) , orchestrated a rebellion against the conservative beliefs and literary ideals of the 1950s. Howl, utilizing picturesque imagery, expounds holistically upon the instigator of the movement in culmination with personal experiences of beat members. Accordingly “Howl” evokes feelings of raw emotional intensity that reflects the mindset in which the poem was produced. The piece is structured into three stanzas, sacrificing temporal order for emphasis on emotional progression. The first sequence rambles of rampant drug forages and lewd sexual encounters, eliciting intonations of impetuous madness, one ostensibly hinging upon on a interminable need for satiation of hedonistic desires. Concordantly the following stanza elucidates upon the cause of the aforementioned impulsive madness (i.e corruption of the materialistic society motivated by capitalism), conveying an air of hostility coalesced with quizzical exasperation. Yet, the prose concludes by turning away from the previous negative sentiments. Furthermore, Ginsberg embraces the once condemned madness in a voice of jubilation, rhapsodizing about a clinically insane friend while ascertaining the beats are with him concerning this state of der...
Ginsberg, Benjamin, Theodore J Lowi and Margaret Weir. We the people. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Print.
...erg’s lines are inwardly. The self of Whitman is all-encompassing but Ginsberg’s self is passive, lacking diversity by excluding rural settings. In short, Ginsberg’s Howl” is a journey through a different route to reality by leaving the doubts behind and taking the lead role of a public American poet-prophet, which Whitman only dreamt of in his life by composing poetry for an imagined audience.
The world was in 1950 at a point of multiple crossroads. After two World Wars an exemplary series of bad events followed, like the Cold War and the atomic menace. But it was also the beginning of some prosperity. People started again to gather material values. Nevertheless, the slow awakening from the fog of war was a process too complex to be generally accepted. In an apparently healing world there were still too many fears and too many left behind. On this ground of alienation, isolation and despair Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” emerged together with the Beat movement. John Tytell observed that the “Beat begins with a sense of natural displacement and disaffiliation, a distrust of efficient truth, and an awareness that things are often not what
Carl Sandburg has been captivating reader’s attention since his first published poem in 1920’s(Baym 763). Sandburg understood the powerful use that literary devices play in literary works. He was known for using these devices to connect with readers, and implementing deeper themes into his works. He is one of the most famous poets for using these techniques. Nina Baym wrote that “Sandburg believed that the people themselves, rather than a cadre of intellectuals acting on behalf of the people, would ultimately shape their own destiny”(763). He shaped his literary work so people of all demographics could relate, and embedded different unique perspectives with literary device for people who
Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" is a complex and intriguing poem about the divine in the common world. The minor themes of drugs and sexuality work together to illuminate the major theme of spirituality. The poem reveals through a multitude of sharp images and phrases that everything from drug use to homosexuality to mental illness is holy, even in a world of atom bombs and materialistic America, which Ginsberg considers not to be holy and he refers to as Moloch. As it is stated in Ginsberg's "Footnote To Howl," "The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is/ holy! The tongue and cock and hand and *censored* holy! / Everything is Holy! Everybody's holy! Everywhere is holy!" (3-5).
The beat movement was a movement that began in the 1950s and was centered “in the bohemian artist communities” of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York (Britannica). The people part of this movement, often called “beats”, rejected square values and “advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz” and “sex” (Britannica). The beats, in their literature, would openly speak about the presence of things and ideas in society which were not normally spoken about. Throughout the epic novel, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, it is evident that the beat movement had a major influence on Robbins and the novel as he does this too. This is supported by Robbins’s diverse set of characters, the openness with which he talks
...g with many individuals, are alienated and in turn, wish for extreme change and even another life. Ginsberg conveys a vital message that carries through to the year 2010 even more. Materialism does not make a person, it is insignificant. What is imperative is the natural world; beauty, individuality, and real human interactions as these are concepts that make an individual.
Ginsberg says that Moloch is a “sphinx of cement and aluminum”, a “heavy judger of men”, and “whose soul is electricity and banks” (line 79-85). All these can point towards higher powers such as the Government. Such things like government buildings, the law makers, and the banks that control all the money in our cities and states. This means that our government can be the Moloch in our lives just like how they were to Ginsberg. Ginsberg says that it is “Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy” and that it is Moloch in which he “wakes up in”. The word play used confirms that he is suffering by the hands of “Moloch”, the ridged and unchangeable false god that we sacrifice our very lives
The 1950’s beatniks gather around coffeeshops, writing and grumbling about the unfairness of the government and society’s closed mind. Today, youth gather around their laptops and type away, despairing over the unfairness of the government and society’s closed mind. Allen Ginsberg’s poetry embodies those angry youth. His unique choices in diction, symbolism and imagery artfully conveys his criticism against the wrongdoings of Uncle Sam and his subjects. Through his poem America, Ginsberg reaches out to all generations of people and exposes the ethical mistakes that both the government and society as a whole make, and these mistakes are classic in the sense that it is always a mistake that everyone keeps repeating.