Ginsberg's Howl: a Counterculture Manifesto

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Ginsberg's Howl: a Counterculture Manifesto

Allen Ginsberg dives into the wreck of himself and of the world around him to salvage himself and something worth saving of the world. In this process, he composes Howl to create a new way of observation for life through the expression of counterculture. Protesting against technocracy, sex and revealing sexuality, psychedelic drugs, visionary experience, breaking the conventions of arts and literature; all basic characteristics of counterculture are combined and celebrated in Howl, as it becomes `a counterculture manifesto' for the first time. Howl elaborates the results of technocracy, as it mechanizes the human soul, human creativity. Technocracy takes away the emotion, feeling, random combination of creative thoughts from human mind and makes the human race depended on technology and mechanized society. Howl explicitly discusses sex and Ginsberg's own homosexual orientation. Mostly there is a sense of despair and desperation about sex. In this poem, there is a visionary experience mainly influenced by Zen, a Buddhist notion emphasizing on meditation and insight, a popular religion among young Americans. Howl reveals the secrets of drugs. There are references of incidents related to drugs and its effects. The attention is on psychedelic state of mind and personal experiences regarding drugs. Howl itself is breaking the literary convention of poetry by its being a genre of inspiration poetry. And it pays homage to arts in a very different way. Ginsberg sees America and feels the madness going through the veins of the country. Howl was an underground poetry; outlawed poetry but still it conferred a strange power. There are something wonderfully subversive about Howl, something the p...

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...and terror- Allen Ginsberg tells the truth, as best he can, about himself, the world, and the cosmos. Ginsberg insists and aims for "candor, accurate candor, total candor" in his poetry. Howl is explosive- as befitting a poem for the atomic age- and yet it is also symmetrical. In Howl Ginsberg is at his most original. In Howl, he moved American poetry forward, forging a global tradition of poetry that includes Whitman, Eliot, Rimbaud, Williams, and a bit of Garcia Lorca and Mayakovsky, too. Eliot wrote, "Every supreme poet, classic or not, tends to exhaust the ground he cultivates." In Howl, Ginsberg exhausts the ground he cultivates through the manifestation of counterculture.

Works Cited:

Raskin, Jonah. American Scream. California. University of California Press: 2004.

Rozak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. New York. Doubleday & Company: 1969.

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