Howl By Allen Ginsberg Essay

HOWL Analysis “Howl” is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg. At first glance, the poem appears to be a disorganized mess of words, moving from one sentence to the other almost like an enormous run-on sentence. Listening to Ginsberg read, he has an almost monotone voice, jumping from sentence to sentence in a way that mesmerizes the listener. This tone along with his choice of words sets the mood of the poem.

Allen Ginsberg’s revolutionary poem, Howl, is a powerful portrayal of life degraded. It represents the harsh life of the beat generation and chronicles the struggles of the repressed. Howl is a poem of destruction. Destruction of mind, body, and soul through the oppression of the individual. Using powerful diction, Allen Ginsberg describes this abolition of life and its implications through our human understanding of abstractions like Time, Eternity, and self. The poem’s jumbled phrasing and drastic emotion seems to correspond with the minds of the people it describes. Ginsberg uses surprisingly precise and purposeful writing to weave the complex

The standards of obscenity and what is and is not protected by the First Amendment has evolved as the fields of literature and art have expanded. In 1956, the headlines were filled with mentions of Howl being fought about in court. Howl, a poem written by Ginsberg, is focused on the “outcast” groups of American society such as the mentally ill, members of the LGBT community, and drug users. Originally, he did not intend for the poem to get out to the public due to the references from his own life with past loves, friends, and experiences. But Ferlinghetti, overhearing the poem read for the first time publically, offered to publish the poem. Soon afterwards, the poem was taken to court. The personal bits and certain details of the poem got the poem sent to court where it was put through the newer standards and reading practices to determine obscenity. At the end of the trial, the judge determined that Howl was not be obscene and was protected by the First Amendment.

Howl by Alan Ginsberg: A Time for Rebellion “Who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,” -Allen Ginsberg Society has its norms. These norms were determined by the general opinion of the population living in it.

With reference to Ginsberg's emulation of Walt Whitman's content, the Norton Anthology, Postmodern American Poetry, states that, "Ginsberg proposed a return to the immediacy, egalitarianism and visionary ambitions of Blake and Whitman." (130). His poem "America" caters toward themes of democracy, something Whitman's poetry also does. Yet unlike Whitman, Ginsberg takes a more questioning stance on America and does not use his poem to praise the nation.

Therefore, Ginsberg’s Howl convinces readers that the themes of suffering and isolation expose the corrupt values of American society. Howl focuses on the detrimental culture of mankind that the poet endured

The form of Ginsberg’s poem challenges the American culture by resistance from “best minds”. Howl is separated to three sections that include long lines, which look like paragraphs. Resisting

Born in Newark in 1926, Allen Ginsberg would grow up to be one of America’s most influential and controversial poets. His expertise is present in poems like “America” and “Supermarket in California”. In these poems, Ginsberg uses free verse poetry and a constant flow of ideas to make his point. These ideas are accurately represented to show his true beliefs because everything is instantaneously flowing. This flow of words in his poems can especially be seen in “America”, and as a literary critic Caitlin Stanley referred to it as “spontaneous composition”. Both of these poems are critiques and admiration poems about America. He is able to reflect his controversial positions of the time by trying to fight against the conformity and issues of

“Howl” is meant to be a snapshot of Beatnik life. It is the fractured stories of the fractured lives of the “best minds.” Ginsberg uses the "who" to start many of the lines and to designate these “best minds” as the character for the poem. Ginsberg views the best minds to be the people who live outside of society, the people who [were] “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”. Howl" is partly a reflection on what American culture and society of the 1940's and 50's had done to those that would not line up in conformity to American culture and politics, what America had done to these “best minds”.

“Hear The Meaning Behind My Howl” Allen Ginsberg, an American poet from the 1950s, started to work on his poem Howl in 1954 and was published in 1956. Howl expressed Ginsberg’s experiences and feelings through this poem at the time when there were many political issues in America. He lived through the madness of World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the post-war era. With all of the political madness in the air, the Beat Generation came to be. The Beat Generation rejected the standards of society and materialism; they were an underground, anti-conformist youth group.

Ginsberg’s work often represents a struggle for spiritual survival in a dehumanized, repressive society. This can be seen in his writing of “Howl”:

Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!” where he explores the institutions of Moloch. Ginsberg writes from the bottom up “dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn...” of him and his people “looking for an angry fix,” (5) where angry fix is a frequent reference to the use of hard drugs. “ Ginsberg seemed to struggle with the institutions of the 1950’s.

Allen Ginsberg rose to be one of the most acclaimed poets, popular icons, and leading figures of the Beat Generation era. Allen Ginsberg was known for his most popular poem “Howl”, in which he described his views society and his longing for freedom. Ginsberg rose to his fame during the Beat Generation movement by contributing to the era with his reluctance to conform to the rules, narrow views of society, lack of freedom and repression of one’s voice or opinions. The Beat Generation movement was a group of poets who were rebels in a way, against society’s rules and the typical life of a “square”, which were people who basically stuck to the conventional rules, never really voiced their own opinion. However, the members of the Beat Movement

The Beats were the radical outcasts of the 1950s, creating obscene, anti-war and thought provoking poetry. Not only did they not fit in with the norms of the time, they actively fought against them. The Beats were new and fascinating, though not to be openly awarded, they were to be condemned for their non-conformity. Even though they were portrayed as deviants, the interest and controversy surrounding them helped to boost their message and gain them fame and adoration. I did not have much of an opinion on the subculture of the Beats before this class, the only poem from this subculture that I had been exposed to beforehand was Howl by Ginsberg. Now I can fully appreciate Ginsberg’s work, by understanding the constraints of the time period, and the fight for the freedom of speech I have a high level of respect for the Beats.

The sheer audacity of a statement like this in 1955 has no comparison in present-day American society. In effect, Ginsberg was announcing himself as a criminal, a felon, and a traitor. Yet he antagonizes the situation further by saying, "You should have seen me reading Marx. / My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right." (P-M 369) Ginsberg's cynical nature shines here as he is pronounced sane by a doctor, who is probably certified by a federal department of medicine, when Senator McCarthy would have you believe that Communists are dangerous and/or mentally instable. It is also important to mention the reference made to marijuana in this passage. Ginsberg was an avid marijuana user and was at the forefront of the psychedelic revolution in the late 1960's, but it is apparent that he used the hallucinogen regularly almost a decade earlier.