"Howl" Analysis

First off, this poem is insane! It’s nothing like the usual poem you read in school and I’m not ashamed to say I like it and feel its creativity more so any poem I’ve read. At the beginning Ginsberg shows the toll drugs have taken on his once creative friends and how they seem to be falling away from the lives they once lived. “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,” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. It’s the first line and it speaks so clear. His once proud, genius friends are losing it. Their minds, souls, everything is falling apart. ”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,” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. This reads like a wakeup call. All that they had worked for was falling apart in a drug fueled self-absorbed mess. Losing sight of what they had worked for to begin with and getting lost in a false reality. It sounds so real because it is. Through the despair Ginsberg pulled himself back up and tries to put in words the loss he feels for the “family” he once had. The Beatniks had turned into junkies and drunks, luckily Ginsberg saw this and put his mind right on paper writing honestly about what he saw going on around him. ”who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. It is said that Ginsberg was under the influence of the Psycodelic drug Peyote when he wrote “Howl” and in this last passage he seems to call out everyone, not just his friends but his peers. Ginsberg was looking at all the people around him and realizing that he was disgusted by the whole thing. Everything was not perfect as it had seemed. His generation was blowing it. No one had nor would fix the everyday growing problems that are our lives. Every generation has problems, Ginsberg just choose to call out the problem in hope that they would be fixed to no avail.

                “Howl” then goes into its second part, there are three altogether. It starts back up where it had left off only calling out normal society even more then he had to begin with. “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 Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg sees our government, industries, the whole lot for what it is. Our society is built on the backs of the poor while the rich get richer and everyone stands aside watching as if its normal and fine. America at the time was still segregated and overtly racist. Ginsberg was an open homosexual. To speak out like this definitely brought a lot of negative attention to Ginsberg and he knew it and wasn’t afraid to speak up. It is utterly amazing to think of the amount of courage that it took to simply be who he was as a person. The fact that he wasn’t beat to death by a group of “normal” white male citizens at the time is kind of weird. Ginsberg was everything that these people hated, and he wouldn’t back down without a fight.

The end of “Howl” is quite different. It’s as if Ginsberg is thinking about what the world could and should be. “ I’m with you in Rockland  where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside    O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.” “Howl” Allen Ginsberg. What could America be? It is an unanswered question. What America is today has a lot to do with this poem. The human race has taken great advances since Ginsberg wrote “Howl”. I would argue that we would live in a much different society if Ginsberg hadn’t opened up and said what he felt. We take our Freedom for Speech for granted and don’t realize how strong it can be. Life is basic striving for equality and the betterment of mankind are very noble causes. We need to get up and see how we are all and how we affect each other. What we have as humans is a gift that we should be taking advantage of and help those who can’t help themselves. Ginsberg devoted his life mankind and will only grow stronger with time.