Allen Ginsberg
Howl and other Poems
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Howl and Other Poems: The Scandal
On 3 October 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco,
Allen Ginsberg began a legend with the first public
reading of Howl.
The Beat Generation had found its voice, and the
museum has never been the same. Notoriety and
litigation followed.
Howl became a cause celebre in the fifties and its
author a counter cultural institution and magnet for
the media, ever thirsty for eye-catching exemplars of
cultural change.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Despite the fact that it has been fashionable to say that
Howl exploded on the American literary scene like a
bombshell, that San Francisco finally “turned Ginsberg
on”, and that this poem heralded in the Beat
Generation, it is difficult to find in this admittedly
extraordinary poem much that has not been anticipated
in inchoate and sometimes even mature form in Empty
Mirror.
Howl is the crystallization of incipient attitudes and
techniques of a new poetic direction or even a sudden
eruption of outrage.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 It cannot even be said that Howl is unique in form or
intention. It is the end of Modern Poetry.
Most would agree that this type of poetry is one of the
oldest traditions, that of the Minor poets in the Bible.
Howl is not a genesis but an amplification of
Modernity which brings to an end.
Part of the reason for considering Howl an amplification
has to do with the end of a poetic nihilism literature
that began at the beginning of the XXth century.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The furor surrounding its initial publication was like a
shot head round the world.
The poem was enshrouded by such sensationalism
during the months of litigation that immediately
followed its release that there was little opportunity
for sober, reflective digestion of it.
Responsible commentary appeared mostly in Judge
Horn’s court-room where the atmosphere was at least
as much political as literary.
A testimony made by a prosecution witness stated: “You
feel like you are going through the gutter when you have
to read that staff”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 However, Lawrence Ferlinghetti said: “If nothing else,
the legal proceedings brought against Howl for
obscenity served to make it easily one of the best
selling volumes of poetry en the twentieth century.
Ferlinghetti adds: It is not the poet but what he
observes which is revealed as obscene. Society is
obscene.
The great obscene wastes of Howl are the sad wastes of a
mechanized world, lost among atom bombs and insane
nationalisms.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 For an unsuspecting popular audience, the poem
recorded the despair and desolation of a strange and
threatening population of “Angelheaded hipsters,”
who were alienated, disaffiliated, and “destroy by
madness, starving hysterical naked / dragging themselves
through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix”.
 Ginsberg and the Beat Attitude
(Hipster: a young person, disillusion, extravagant)
I feel as if I am at a dead
End and so I am finished.
All spiritual facts I realize
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Are true but I never escape
The feeling of being closed in
And the futility of all done and said.
Maybe if I continued things
Would please me more but now
I have no hope and I a tired.
 The Empty Mirror begins with a poetic statement of
the profoundest fatigue and hopelessness which will
be carried out in Howl.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The poem expresses not exultation, not the certitude
of a life that has found comfort in the evidence of things
unseen, but the mood of a spirit that has long been
besieged by doubts and has experienced a face-to-face
encounter with the enervating spectre of despair.
 “I am tired,” the poet says, and in this weariness we
hear the echo of the existentialist complains so
familiar to us in the modern age. Kierkegaard might
have diagnosed the malady as the “sickness unto death”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Like existentialism, the definitive boundaries of
“beat” have been blurred both by the variety of
attitudes that they enclose and by the notoriety that the
popular press has brought to the term.
 The word is all to familiar with the “beatnik”, but it
is less so with the philosophy behind the beard and
sandals.
 The beat in the fifties was to feel the bored fatigue of
the soldier required to perform endless, meaningless
tasks that have no purpose, like Sisyphus.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Society imposed authority from without, but
beatniks obeyed an authority from within. Viewed as
a social phenomenon, they appeared “fed up” and
recalcitrant –grumbling malcontents and irresponsible
hedonists. Inwardly the case was quite different.
 The beatniks regarded themselves as pioneers,
explorers of interior reality; in this respect, they
resembled traditional religious mystics.
Ginsberg’s visionary poetics is directed toward the
poetry and the poetics and not toward an ultimate,
divine saviour.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The beats’ much sensationalized use of drugs and
hallucinogens only illustrates that their quest for inward
reality had taken advantage of the resources of modern
science.
 The incessant search for reality within was a quest
for authenticity that reason, it was felt, indifferent to.
It called for a exploration at the extremes of human
experience, as far beyond the limits of reason as
possible, thus placing uncommon stress upon subjective
moods.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Unlike the rationalist they would not attempt to
overcome their fears, guilt, dread, and cares; rather, they
exploited these feelings in order to reach new levels of
truth about themselves. Moods, they passionately
believed, were indices of reality.
Obviously, such a commitment to internal truth not only
permits but demands the uninhibited confessions that
tend to make conventional readers squirm. Most beat
writers, especially Ginsberg, flaunt their most intimate
acts and feelings –masturbation, sodomy, drug addiction,
erotic dreams- in aggressively explicit street language.
To the social conservative, it is shameless exhibitionism.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 To the beats, such expression is the denial of shame
itself, a manifesto that nothing human or personal
can be degrading.
The beats assume the role of a nonbelligerent
opposition, meeting the rigid rationalism of society with
deliberate irrationality, in opposition to society’s
(ir)rationality.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The beats were indifferent enemies of society but
enemies nonetheless; because they were appalled by
the ugliness of its materialism and goals and the
emptiness of its values.
 They were indifferent because they have come to
believe that they could not change society –change
could only come from within.
So beatniks chose not to fight. In the battle for social,
spiritual, and aesthetic progress, they were conscientious
objectors.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Disaffiliation and Death
The words that were most often used to describe this
posture were disaffiliation and disengagement. They
felt that the only way one can call his soul his own is by
becoming an outcast.
 They felt modern society had crashed the concepts of
self and neighbour into a grotesque hypocrisies that
reduced civilized living to an immense lie, the beats
disaffiliated for the purpose of making interpersonal
fidelity possible.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The truth about humanity –the truth that society
obdurately censors – is shouted by Ginsberg in his
“Footnote to Howl: Everything is holy! Everybody’s
holy! Everywhere is holy! Everyday is in eternity!
Everyman’s an angel.
 Religion
Beats were prone to religious illumination, but the
essential religious matrix of the beats, however, was in
the Orient.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
This, because of its conception of the holiness of
personal impulse.
Zen Buddhism was particularly attractive. Every
impulse of the soul, the psyche, and the heart was of
holiness as shown in the Footnote to Howl.
The Judeo-Christian dualism of good and evil is
obliterated by the oriental relativism that neatly does
away with the consequences of the spiritual pride that
has bloodied the pages of Western ecclesiastical history.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
In the Hsin-hsin Ming or the Treatise of Faith in the
Mind, a poem attributed to Seng-ts’an, a sixth century
Zen master, can be found the following words:
If you want to get the plain truth
Be not concerned with the right or wrong
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind
 The view represented by this fragment, that the conflict
between right and wrong is an unnecessary and
harmful concern, had enormous appeal for the beat
writers.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The basic corruption of the “square world”, as they saw
it, was its compulsion to be right.
Because of this dualism, people suffered the burdens of
shame and guilt, which seemed to them the most
significant by-products of Western cultural
psychology.
And, shame and guilt were considered overwhelming
obstacles to a view of life that celebrated the holy
integrity of humanity and the world.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The Poem
Howl
For Ginsberg it is not a question of art imitating
nature but art being nature.
Ginsberg began experimenting with ways to restore
speech to the language of poetry.
Howl’s images obviously owe much to this counsel, but
restoring speech to language entails more than just
pronouncing a statement of intention.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
In the Indian Journal he declares that “the problem is to
write poetry [...] which sounds natural, not self
conscious”, defining literary self-consciousness.
 Not to be confused “simple sophomoric (self-assured,
immature) recognizable egotistical self consciousness.
Not natural to the man in the man – merely a stance.
 Self-consciousness, then, is an attitude, a stance, that is
hostile to the spontaneity that quickens the ordinary
mind, and here Ginsberg shows his allegiance to “open
form”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Open form is the epistemological effort to postmodernist
poetics to become equal rather than referential to
reality.
 The writer follows no outside authority in creation but
is wholly dominated during the creative act by the
experience itself.
This means, of course, that the pure reality of the
experience cannot be adulterated by revision: […]
whatever you said at that moment was whatever you said
at that moment” Ginsberg points out. “So in a sense you
couldn’t change, you could go on to another moment”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The poem is not about a subject; it is the subject
itself. And there are several techniques in the writing of
the poem.
The first technique it is unselfconscious because it is
not separate from the experience it enacts and therefore
cannot reflect upon it.
 It is performance rather than artifact.
By 1962 Ginsberg had moved in this subjective direction
far enough to state:
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
[…] how do you write poetry about poetry but making
use of a radical method eliminating subject matter
altogether…. I seem to be delaying a step forward in this
field (elimination of the subject matter) and hanging on
to habitual humanistic series of autobiographical
photographs … although my own consciousness has
gone beyond the conceptual to the non-conceptual
episodes of experience, inexpressible by old means of
humanistic storytelling.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The burden for readers of such open work is that they
find themselves “naked” in the poem’s field.
There is no conceptual apparatus, no formal tradition
of “humanistic storytelling” to guide them. They are
on their own.
Thus images are for the body not the reason, and
readers are expected to “avoid all irritable reaching
after fact and reason” and to remain “in the absolute
condition of present things”, that is, in the energy
field of the poem itself.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
None of the classical critical approaches are relevant
to Ginsberg’s open forms, for they are mesmerized by
the metaphor of artist-as-maker and art as the object
made.
Talk, however, is an activity, a process, an event.
 True, it can be notated on then printed page, but its
essential value is its movement. (Cage).
We may only nod our head occasionally, widen our eyes
in surprise, grimace in exasperation, or simply sigh, but
in urgent conversation we are called upon to “do”, to
react, to engage our energies with those of the poem.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The poetic quest for unadulterated reality involves,
for poets like Ginsberg, breaking down “ the logical or
necessary requirement of plot”. Since plot is a artifice,
it cannot be life.
A second technique is to make “the poem
occasional in a new sense, a throw away rough
jotting”.
The roughness presumable equates with the real.
Ginsberg comment that Howl was composed without
thought to publication suggests his relation to this
principle.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 A third technique, perhaps the most relevant to
Ginsberg, is “luxuriating in the private and
sensational at the expense of plot”.
“The poem might be conceived as an orgasm, or a series
of orgasms”, expressed in words like ‘Wow’, ‘Bomb’
and nonse-syllables, sputterings, pseudo-puns.
The poet attempts to do away with the ‘one remove’,
the imitation; the poem becomes, or is meant to
become, the experience itself.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 On the positive side, one might see it as reflecting the
emergence of apocalyptic poetry as an event in itself.
It is not difficult to understand why the claim is so
often made that Ginsberg’s poetry is unreadable.
Ginsberg might be the first to agree; his poetry is not
made to be read but to be lived through.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The theme of the poem is announced very clearly in
the opening line.
 Then the following lines that make up the first part
attempt to create the impression of a kind of
nightmare world in which people representing “the
best minds of my generation”, in the author’s view, are
wandering like damned souls in hell.
That is done through a kind of series of what one
might call surrealistic images, a kind of state of
hallucinations.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Then in the second section the mood of the poem
changes and it becomes an indictment of those
elements in modern society that, in the author’s view,
are destructive of the best qualities in human nature and
the best minds.
Those elements are, I would say, predominantly
materialism, conformity and mechanization leading
toward war.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
And then the third part is a personal address to a
friend of the poet or of the person who is speaking in
the poet’s voice –those are not always the same thingwho is mad in the madhouse, and is the specific
representative of what the author regards as a general
condition.
The Foot Note to Howl is the possibility of some hope.
 In Howl, Ginsberg explains, in 1969:
You’re free to say any dam thing you want; but people
are so scared of hearing you say what’s unconsciously
universal that it’s comical.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 “So I wrote with an element of comedy – partly
intended to soften the blow”.
Howl was “typed out madly in one afternoon,” Ginsberg
tells us, “a tragic custard-pie comedy of wile phrasing,
meaningless images for the beauty of abstract poetry of
mind running along making awkward combinations like
Charley Chaplin’s walk…”
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
These comments speak to a sense of creative freedom,
the aggressive irresponsibility of unrestrained whimsy
and the deliberate indifference to personal and
literary inhibitions of any sort.
Ginsberg said: I Thought I wouldn’t write a poem but just
write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination
go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real
mind –sum up my life- something I wouldn’t be able to
show anybody, write for my own soul’s ear and a few
other golden ears.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
But Howl was also a declaration of metrical freedom.
He explains the technique in a way that suggests the full
extent of the sort of metrical freedom Howl
demonstrates:
I wasn’t really working with a classical unit, I was
working with my own natural impulses and writing
impulses. See, the difference is between someone sitting
down to write a poem in a definite preconceived metrical
pattern and filling in that pattern, and someone working
with physiological movements and arriving at a pattern,
and perhaps even arriving at a pattern which might even
have a name, or might even have a classical usage, but
arriving at it organically rather than synthetically.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Howl: Part I
The first part of Howl is a list of the atrocities that
have allegedly been endured by Ginsberg and his
friends.
More generally, these atrocities accumulate to form a
desperate critique of a civilization that has set up a
power structure that determines people’s “mode of
consciousness…. Sexual enjoyment…. Different labours
and loves”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The theme is clearly the same as Ginsberg’s essay:
“Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lams” in which
he pleads: When will we discover an America that will
not deny its own God. Who takes up arms, money, police,
and a million hands to murder the consciousness of God.
Who spits in the beautiful face of Poetry which sings the
Glory of God and weeps in the dust of the world. 55
This text is prose, but it could be easily inserted in the
text of Howl without change.
Even the structural device of the recurring word
‘Who’ is exploited, which demonstrates how blurred,
even nonexistent, is the line between poetry and prose
in Ginsberg’s work.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The word ‘Who’, Ginsberg has explained, was used
in Howl “to keep the beat, a base to keep measure,
return to and take off from again onto another streak
(line) of invention.”
One may even say that who was Ginsberg’s point of
contact between vision and reality, an anchor that
regularly brought his free flights back to earth and
kept the poem from disappearing into the mists of a
subjective wasteland.
Howl is then rhizomatic writing.
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,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up
smoking
in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating
across
the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw
Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes
hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of
war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing
obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their
money
in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the
wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo
with
a belt of marijuana for New York […].
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
‘Who’, it can be said, also served as an organizational
strategy: by its sanction, otherwise unrelated chunks
of inspiration could be thrown spontaneously into the
poem.
In other words, the device was a structural shield that
kept “thinking” at bay, thereby allowing imaginative
illumination and association unlimited freedom.
Such technique is indicative of a poetic movement that
is cumulative rather than logical or progressive, and it
is uniquely suited to what Ginsberg calls an “expanding
ego psychology”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Such a psychology, he states, “results in an
enumerative style, the catalougin of a representative
and symbolical succession of images, conveying the
sensation of pantheistic unity” as it is shown
particularly in the Footnote to Howl.
The cumulative technique also goes back to the
Hebraic roots that Ginsberg acknowledges as
influences upon his work.
*He notes that [...] the Hebraic poet developed a rhythm
of thought, repeating and balancing ideas and
sentences instead of syllables or accents.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
To read Howl properly, then, is to avoid the impulse
to search for a logic or a traditional connection of
ideas. Howl must be read with a new consciousness.
The yardstick to measure the worth of the first part of
Howl are basically two: the “tightness” of the
‘catalogue’ (images) and the maintenance of
spontaneity.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The first measurement has to do with what Ginsberg
calls “density” – the richness of imagery packed into
a line. By and large, the poem does achieve density.
Some might object that such richness is achieved at
the cost of grammatical coherence. Ginsberg says that
“Nature herself has no grammar” and so the classical
grammarians definition of the sentence as “a complete
thought” or as a construction “uniting subject and
predicate” is simply at odds with reality.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 There is no completeness in nature and therefore
there should be no completeness in the sentence. “The
sentence … is not an attribute of Nature but an accident
of man as a conversational animal”. It is no accident that
the entire seventy-eight-line first section counts
grammatically as a single sentence.
The second measuring stick for evaluation Howl is its
spontaneity.
“But how sustain a long line in poetry”? Ginsberg
asked himself. One perception must immediately and
directly lead to a further perception, that is, in speed.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Spontaneity lives on speed, and the creating poet
must avoid the lag.
He does so, it seems, through association. There are
many examples operative in the first part of Howl, but
Ginsberg has specifically described the principle with
reference to part two.
He begins with a feeling, he says, that develops into
something like a sigh.
Then he looks around for the object that is making
him sigh; the he ‘sighs in words”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
At best, he finds a word or several words that become
key to the feeling, and he builds on them to complete
the statement: Ginsberg explains that It is simply by a
process of association that I find what the rest of the
statement is, what can be collected around that word,
what that word is concerned to.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Ginsberg says, “usually during the composition, step
by step, word by word and adjective by adjective, if
it’s at all spontaneous, I don’t know whether it even
makes sense sometimes”.
Spontaneity seems to require suspension of the
rational faculties for the purpose of permitting the
logic of the heart to operate freely.
Testimony for this assertion is Ginsberg’s own:
“Sometimes it does not make complete sense, and I
start crying”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Clearly Howl, like most of Ginsberg’s work, follows a
grammar of emotion. The “verification principle” is
shifted from the logical positivists’ tests- Can I see it,
smell it, taste it, hear it, o feel it? – to the simple test
of the heart: “Does it make me cry”?
Any analysis or explication of Howl would seem an
affront to the poem’s very method, which is literally a
violent howl of spontaneous, suprarational feeling.
 Ex post facto explanation appears an almost certain
way of completely missing the point.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Christian parallels are unavoidable. The persecution
of the early followers of Christ in Roman catacombs
finds its counterpart in the despair of those “who lit
cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in the
grandfather night”, and those “who were burned alive
in their innocent flannel suits in Madison Avenue
taxicabs of Absolute Reality”.
 Finally, there is Carl Solomon, the supreme martyr –
the archetype who is “really in the total animal soup
of time”- to whom the poem is addressed.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Howl: Part II
Part two of Howl, written under the influence of peyote,
is an accusation: “what sphinx of cement and aluminum
bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and
imagination”. (line 80)
The protagonist “who” is now replaced, in an attempt
to coordinate the structures of the two sections, by
the antagonist “Moloch”.
(Moloch, Molech or Molekh, representing Hebrew ‫מלך‬
mlk, (translated directly into king) is either the name of a
god or the name of a particular kind of sacrifice
associated historically with Phoenician and related
cultures in north Africa and the Levante.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The unraveling of the j’acusse is painfully inevitable,
and Ginsberg is thrown back upon the single
resource of imagery.
However, Ginsberg’s Hebraic lamentation on Moloch
becomes increasingly powerful and leads to the
conclusion where the “mad generation” is hurled “down
on the rocks of Time” (line 95).
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The process of writing this second part is demonstrated
by Ginsberg as follows:
 Partly by simple association, the first thing that
come to your mind like “Moloch is” or “Moloch
who”, and then whatever comes out.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their
skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and
unobtainable dollars!
Children screaming under the stairways! Boys
sobbing in armies!
Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless!
Mental
Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone
soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings
are
judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the
stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running
money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch
whose
breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a
smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch
whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas!
Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog!
Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is
the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless
hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove
and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I
am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened
me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake
up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
Skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks!
monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which
exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the I American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years'
animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad
generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild
eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the
roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river!
into the street!
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
But that also goes along with a definite rhythmic
impulse, like DA de de Da de de Da de de DA DA.
“Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.”
And before I wrote “Moloch whose eyes are a thousand
blind windows”, I had the word, “Moloch, Moloch,
Moloch, and I also had the feeling DA de de DA de de
DA DA”.
“So it was just a question of looking up and seeing a lot
of windows, and saying, oh, windows, of course, but
what kind of windows? But not even that ‘- “Moloch
whose eyes.” “Moloch whose eyes”- which is beautiful
in itself- but what about it, Moloch whose eyes are
what?”
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
“Thousand blind windows”. And I had to finish it
somehow. So I had said “windows”. It looked good
afterward”.
Ginsberg emphasizes the word afterward because the
spontaneity of his poetry depends upon the
existentialist formula: existence precedes essence.
While he is writing, he is living (existing) through the
experience.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
“The structure of Part II, pyramidal, with a graduated
longer response to the fixed base (Ginsberg)”.
“Moloch”, the symbol of social illness, was the metrical
anchor in part two for a series of graphic but predictable
images.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Howl: Part III
Part three begins suspiciously like a “peptalk” or a get-
well card: “Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am” .
Whether this assertion is a diagnosis or flattery
hinges on the connotation one chooses for madness.
Solomon, however, has been raised, through the bulk
of accumulation, to the status of a symbol.
This section only underlines what was already said in
the first part: a lost, mad generation without hopes,
ends up in an madhouse.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Howl: Part III
 Carl Solomon represents an example of the whole
generation, a manifestation of madness and death.
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported
on the radio I'm with you in Rockland
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Whether the following explanation Ginsberg gave for
the total pattern of Howl was premeditated or
afterthought, even he would probably decline to say;
but it does supply a workable rationale for the
project.
“Part I, a lament for the Lamb in America with instance
of remarkable lamblike youths’.
 “Part II names the monster of mental consciousness that
preys on the Lamb”.
“Part III a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory:
“O starry-spangled shock of Mercy!”.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Since the Footnote presumes to offer a cure for the
social illness (Moloch), it is appropriate that the
structure of both sections be roughly parallel and
that the word Holy should operate in the same
manner as it counterpart, Moloch.
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The
nose is holy! The
tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! Everything is holy! Everywhere is holy!
Everyday is in
eternity! Everyman’s an angel!
The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! The madman is holy as
you my sour are
holy!
[…]
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies!
suffering!
magnanimity!
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Howl marks the end of poetry as we have known it.
It brings to an end Modernity and at the same time
opens a new beginning to future poetry.
 His poetry is also closely connected to the musical
work of John Cage and the painting of Jackson
Pollock, who also brought down Modernity in their
respective arts.
 At the same time it presents an allegory of the world
we live in, one without hope and corruption.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Ginsberg describes what he sees in a language that
devours itself.
 The poem is an allegory of the destructive powers of
society, power out of control.
It is also nightmarish representation of a whole
generation which refused to be part of a decadent
society.
Finally, is a cry, a howl with no hope in sight, except
madness and-or death.
End
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Other Poems
Appearing with Howl in the 1956 volume, were other
significant poems, such as America and A Supermarket
in California.
America
America is whimsical, sad, comic, honest, bitter,
impatient, and yet, somehow, incisive.
The poem refuses to settle on a consistent structure. It
is monologue and then drifts off into mutterings
against a hypothetical national alert ego.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The poem is an attempt to catch the mood of a
particular attitude toward the United States without
the interference of logic.
It is a drunken poet arguing after hours with a
drunken nation; and yet, through all the turmoil, the
gibberish, and the illogicality, a broad-based attack,
which rational discourse can only hint at, is launched
against American values.
The seemingly hopeless illogicality of the poem itself
becomes a mirror for the hopeless illogicality it
reflects.
‘America I’ve given you all and now I’am nothing’ (l1)
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Interspersed throughout the poem are lines that
suggest almost all the attitudes, postures, and
convictions of Whitman’s exuberant optimism
toward America are turned into a disillusionment
that suggest the breaking of a covenant: “America I’ve
given you all and now I’m nothing”/ ‘Go fuck yourself
with your atom bomb’ (Lines 1, 5)
This admission is followed late in the poem by an
appeal to America to shake off its hypocrisy and be
equal to Whitman’s challenge: “America when will
you be angelic? / When will you take off your clothes?”
(Lines 9-10)
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The sense of devastation is expressed by the following
lines: “When will you look at yourself through the
grave?” (line 10), shortly followed by the here-and-now
position: “America after all it is you and I who are
perfect not the next world” (Line 16).
 It also underlines the injustice that exists in America,
a country that should have no injustice at all: “I say
nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged/ who live in my flowerpots under the
light of five hundred suns’ (Lines 51-53).
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
“I am obsessed by Time Magazine …/Movie
producers… serious but me…. (Lines 41-48) expresses
his impotence facing the ideology provided by the
media and his exclusion from society.
The poem continues in a jerky dialogue full of shifting
issues, which only at the conclusion justifies
nonsensical logic and its logical nonsense:
 “America this is the impression I get from looking in the
television set / America is this correct?” (Lines 69-70)
 It also reveals the obsession that America felt
towards Communism, an obsession that led to
countless injustices:
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 ‘America you don’t want to go to war [….] America is
quite serious. (Lines 62-67)
The poem reveals the disappointment Ginsberg feels
toward America and the total impossibility to change:
“America this is the impression I get from looking in the
television set/America is correct?”
However the poet who refuses war is willing to do its
part to make change happen: “It’s true I don’t want to
join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories,
I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway/America I’m
putting my queer shoulder to the wheel’. (Lines 72-74)
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The poem is an indictment of American values,
belligerence, and a culture of consumerism which
will also be expressed in A Supermarket in California.
 A Supermarket in California
 A Supermarket in California is a study of the contrast
between Whitman’s America and Ginsberg’s.
True to the American idiom, the poet is pictured as
“shopping for images” in the “supermarket” of
American life.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Here is the poet as consumer filling his shopping cart
for the ingredients of his among “Aisles full of
husbands!” (Line 3).
Implicit in his meditation is the question: what would
Whitman have thought of America now?
A dramatic reconstruction takes place: “I saw you,
Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,/ poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the
grocery boys”. (Line 5)
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The poet follows Whitman “in and out of the brilliant
stacks of cans” (Line 6) (follows him also, in poetic
technique), imaginatively feeling the presence of the
“store detective” (Line 8) behind them.
Even here, Ginsberg cannot help underscoring the
illicitness of the poet’s position in society – both his
own and Whitman’s.
No doubt Ginsberg’s many brushes with the authorities
helped nourish his obsession that the way of the true
poet inevitably arouses police suspicion.
But the poet can always enjoy freedom of the mind,
which is suggested in the following lines:
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
We strode… in our /Solitary… frozen /Delicacy….
Cashier (Line 7)
Fortunately, images cost nothing; they have already
been paid for by those who have put them up for
display, and this fact leads to the final meditation of
the last stanza.
“Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (Line
10) Ginsberg asks.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The urgency of the question adds pathos to the
appeal.
 There is not much time. What are the options, old “gray
beard”? (Line 8), and then, at the end there is only
solitude “Will we walk all night through solitary
streets?… we’ll both be lonely”. (Line 13)
 Or will the poet and Whitman give up on their
country out of disappointment, and “stroll dreaming
of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in
driveways, home to our silent cottage”? (Line 14)
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Despair and nostalgia seem the two alternatives, and
the disciple is bewildered.
The poem ends, as inevitably must, with a question:
Ah, dear father…. Teacher…when Charon…
(Charon: Greek god of Hell).
Boat…. Lethe? (Line 15) (Lethe: Oblivion and river of
joyfulness flowing through the Hades).
Whitman’s America was quite different from the one
Ginsberg saw around him.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Conclusion
In Ginsberg poetry, perhaps the greatest burden falls on
the readers of open poetry, for they, even more than the
poets (who at least have the guidance of their own
experiences to assist them) are truly “naked” in the
open field.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
We are advised that an open poem is a re-enactment
rather than an artifact and that they should concern
themselves with absorbing the energies (rather than
substance) that are “held” in kind of dynamic
tension within the field of the poem.
The images of the poems, by virtue of the solidarity that
breath gives them, are allowed the free play of their
individual energies, they are advised, even while,
through juxtaposition with other images, they create
an energy field.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
The character of the engagement that readers are
expected to have is radically different from that with
which they are accustomed.
We are asked to “avoid awareness”, …in the absolute
condition of present things, that is, in the poem itself.
In Whitman’s writing, Ginsberg recognized an astute
critic of American democracy, not the cherubic
optimist so often portrayed by critics.
Whitman’s fundamental belief that only through a
society based on “intense and loving comradeship” of
man, real, lasting intimacy, unabashed, could the nation
survive.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Ginsberg recognized Whitman as a kindred spirit, a
rebel against both the literary establishment of his
time and the government.
Whitman´s longing for a truly civic America devoid
of class distinctions, probably melded well with
Ginsberg´s own upbringing.
After the II War World Ginsberg did not buy the
package of goodies offered by the emerging
consumerism of the country was experiencing, nor
could post-war optimism over a healthy economy placate
yearnings for a greater sense of freedom.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 NOTES FOR HOWL AND OTHER POEMS*
 By 1955 I wrote poetry adapted from prose seeds,
journals, scratchings, arranged by phrasing or breath
groups into little short-line patterns according to ideas of
measure of American speech.
 I suddenly turned aside in San Francisco, unemployment
compensation leisure, to follow my romantic
inspiration—Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 I thought I wouldn't write a poem, but just write what I
wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open
secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind—
sum up my life—something I wouldn't be able to show
anybody, write for my own soul's ear and a few other
golden ears.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 So the first line of `Howl', `I saw the best minds', etc. the
whole first section typed out madly in one afternoon, a
huge sad comedy of wild phrasing, meaningless images
for the beauty of abstract poetry of mind running along
making awkward combinations like Charlie Chaplin's
walk, long saxophone-like chorus lines I knew Kerouac
would hear sound of—taking off from his own inspired
prose line really a new poetry.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 I depended on the word `who' to keep the beat, a base to
keep measure, return to and take off from again onto
another streak of invention: `who lit cigarettes in boxcars
boxcars boxcars', continuing to prophesy what I really
knew despite the drear consciousness of the world: `who
were visionary indian angels'.
 Have I really been attacked for this sort of joy? So the
poem got serious, I went on to what my imagination
believed true to Eternity (for I'd had a beatific
illumination years before during which I'd heard Blake's
ancient voice & saw the universe unfold in my brain), &
what my memory could reconstitute of the data of
celestial experience.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 But how sustain a long line in poetry (lest it lapse into
prosaic)?
 It's natural inspiration of the moment that keeps it
moving, disparate thinks put down together, shorthand
notations of visual imagery, juxtapositions of hydrogen
juke-box—abstract haikus sustain the mystery & put iron
poetry back into the line: the last line of `Sunflower
Sutra' is the extreme, one stream of single word
associations, summing up. Mind is shapely, Art is
shapely.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Meaning Mind practised in spontaneity invents forms in
its own image & gets to Last Thoughts. Loose ghosts
wailing for body try to invade the bodies of living men.
 I hear ghostly Academics in Limbo screeching about
form.
 So these poems are a series of experiments with the
formal organization of the long line.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 I had an apt on Nob Hill, got high on Peyote, & saw an
image of the robot skullface of Moloch in the upper
stories of a big hotel glaring into my window; got high
weeks later again, the Visage was still there in red
smokey downtown Metropolis, I wandered down Powell
Street muttering, `Moloch Moloch' all night & wrote
`Howl' ii nearly intact in cafeteria at foot of Drake Hotel,
deep in the hellish vale. Here the long line is used as a
stanza focus broken within into exclamatory units
punctuated by a base repetition, Moloch.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The rhythmic paradigm for Part iii was conceived &
half-written same day as the beginning of `Howl', I went
back later & filled it out. Part I, a lament for the Lamb in
America with instances of remarkable lamblike youths;
Part ii names the monster of mental consciousness that
preys on the Lamb; Part iii a litany of affirmation of the
Lamb in its glory: `O starry spangled shock of Mercy.'
 The structure of Part iii, pyramidal, with a graduated
longer response to the fixed base....
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 A lot of these forms developed out of an extreme
rhapsodic wail I once heard in a madhouse. Later I
wondered if short quiet lyrical poems could be written
using the long line. `Cottage in Berkeley' &
`Supermarket in California' (written same day) fell in
place later that year.
 Not purposely, I simply followed my Angel in the course
of compositions.
 What if I just simply wrote, in long units & broken short
lines, spontaneously noting prosaic realities mixed with
emotional upsurges, solitaries? Transcription of Organ
Music (sensual data), strange writing which passes from
prose to poetry & back, like the mind.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 What about poem with rhythmic buildup power equal to
`Howl' without use of repeated base to sustain it?
 A word on Academies; poetry has been attacked by an
ignorant & frightens bunch of bores who don't
understand how it's made, & the trouble with these
creeps is they wouldn't know Poetry if it came up and
buggered them broad daylight.
 A word on the Politicians: my poetry is Angelical
Ravings, & has nothing to do with dull materialistic
vagaries about who should shoot who.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 The secrets of individual imagination—which are
transconceptual & non-verbal—I mean unconditioned
Spirit—are not for sale to this consciousness, of no use
to this world, except perhaps to make it shut its trap &
listen to ti music of the Spheres.
 Who denies the music of the spheres denies poet denies
man, & spits on Blake, Shelley, Christ, & Buddha.
Meanwhile have ball.
 The universe is a new flower. America will be
discovered.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Who wants war against roses will have it. Fate tells big
lies, & the gay Creator dances ,-r his own body in
Eternity.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
55Nevertheless, a few generalizations and
observations may prove helpful guideposts through
this “animal cry” of human anguish.
First, the poet sets himself up as observer in the
opening line.
He is witness to the destruction of “the best minds of my
generation” by madness. Madness presumably is the
state of civilization that the poet understands as
hostile to the sentient (conscious) martyrs whose
collective experiences under its tyranny are catalogue
in a cumulative, cresting wave of relative clauses.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Second, at the same time, madness occurs thematically
in the first part of the poem in other forms.
For example, it is suggested that these martyrs have
been attracted to what is implied as a mad quest:
they are “burning for the ancient heavenly connection of
the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night”, and
they have “bared their brains to Heaven”.
Further along in the poem it is mentioned that they
“thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed
(shined) in supernatural ecstasy”, which is later followed
by a reference to Ginsberg’s own commitment to an
asylum, and finally (line 70), Carl Solomon, who is
undergoing treatment at Rockland State Hospital.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 There is a degree of ambivalence in the use of this
crucial term madness in the first line. Does it reflect
merely the “madness: as an officially acceptable level
of reality that is uncongenial to the suffering heroes
of the poem, or is it not possible that this destructive
“madness” also describes the predicament of
nonconformism?
In other words, are not these martyrs self-destroyed
because they refuse to live on the acceptable plane of
official reality?
In these terms, the “angelheaded hipsters” (beatniks)
are embracing “madness” as an alternative to an
unbearable sanity.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
 Their madness consists in their “burning for the
ancient nonspiritual view of the world, in their
“burning for the ancient heavenly connection” in a
civilization that has proclaimed that God is dead.
For this reason Ginsberg emphasizes their thinking:
“they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in
supranatural ecstasy”.