Sexuality, Misery, and Social Conflict in Howl, a Poem by Allen Ginsberg

"Howl" is a mind-opening work with its explorations of sexuality, misery and social conflict in a non-traditional poetic form, depending on a freewheeling mixture of influences. Let me start with the overly dramatic use of sexual images and symbolisms in this poem, both gay (line 37) and straight (line 42), and sometimes with objects (line 41). Before Howl, no widely popular American poetry had such shockingly graphic descriptive sexual imagery, which in its nature was declared obscene by the nation's government. Howl seems to illustrate nature's wants for disorder, but its mere appearance is not true to the poem's systematic nature. Howl's structure is made up of three sections and each of these sections is a detailed image on a specific subject.

In the first sentence of the first section, the speaker confesses that he has witnessed the destruction of "the best minds" of his generation. The next dozens of lines of the section are detailed descriptions of these people. The speaker, however, leave us in darkness as to what destroyed this generation, yet he leaves a breadcrumb trail for us to find the cause of their termination. Visually we see that many lines begin with the word "who" followed by a verb-a word that talk about these are people "who did this, who did that,".

The speaker rapidly inform us that these "best minds" were not people whom society in the 1950s would have identified with the best American ideals. According to the speaker, they are poets, dropouts, adventurers, bums, musicians, political dissidents and drug users. The poem describes the lives of drug addicts and alcoholics, and although these people might be represented as "angelic" for other reasons, the consequences of their drug use are disastrous and visible. Most of the imagery of drug use occurs in the first section, before the poem turns toward the vision of Moloch and mental illness.

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If the key word of the second section asks "What?"; as in, what destroyed the best minds of his generation. Ginsberg delivers the revelation immediately: Moloch. In the Hebrew Bible, Moloch is a demanding god to whom children were sacrificed by fire. In Ginsberg's imagination, Moloch the definition of war, government, capitalism, and the mainstream culture, all of which might be can be trapped into the concept of the "machine" or "machinery." Moloch is a monster that kills youth and love.

Driven by his Marxist beliefs, Ginsberg proved a pacifist who deemed war as a tool that serves the interests of the rich and powerful. The poem is loaded with images of Cold War anxiety, the Atomic age, and the military-industrial complex. The poem's heroes- the patients of Rockland psychiatric hospital, must stand against and for society with their own "symbolic" weapons.

The third section is to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's close friend from the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. The speaker refers to this psychiatric hospital as the fictional name of "Rockland." Ginsberg illustrates madness to be an elevated state filled with hallucinations and visions and mostly terrifying, as when Solomon feels himself losing "the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss" (line 104). Ginsberg solidifies his solidarity with Solomon repeatedly by using the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland."

The central question of this last section is "Where?"; the speaker uses this question to dig into Solomon's existence within the superficie of the institute. The poem terminates with an image from the speaker's dreams, in which Solomon is walking from New York to the speaker's "cottage" (in Berkeley, California), for their reunion. The poem is created as a reflection of a generation through Ginsberg's eyes as he works his way into finding his identity and destiny.

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