The Full Text of “Howl”
The Full Text of “Howl”
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“Howl” Introduction
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Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956) is the best-known poem produced by the literary movement called the Beat Generation—not to mention one of the most controversial and influential poems of the 20th century. Dedicated to Ginsberg's friend Carl Solomon, who had been confined to a psychiatric institution, the poem is a lament for "the best minds of [Ginsberg's] generation," whom it portrays as having been "destroyed by madness." But it's also a tribute to rebellious artists, thinkers, and hipsters and an attack on the oppressiveness of western society, something it depicts as crushingly conformist, greedy, and violent. With affectionate sympathy, the poem ultimately suggests that the "mad" rebels are really the only sane exceptions to the insane culture of 20th-century America. Written in 1954-'55 and published in Howl and Other Poems (1956), "Howl" became an instant literary sensation and the target of censorship for its graphic language and sexual themes. Its victory in a 1957 obscenity trial paved the way for the publication of other controversial literature in the 1950s and '60s.
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“Howl” Summary
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I
The speaker says that he watched as the greatest thinkers of his lifetime were driven to insanity. They were terribly hungry, distraught, and naked, staggering through Black neighborhoods at sunrise, furiously searching for drugs.
They were angelic-looking bohemian men, craving an ancient sense of sacred communion with the night sky and the powerful force that seems to propel its stars.
Poor, ragged, sunken-eyed, and stoned, they sat smoking in the mystical-seeming darkness of cheap apartments, feeling like they were floating above their cities while thinking about jazz music.
They opened their minds to Heaven under the elevated subway train, and they had a vision of glowing Islamic angels moving slowly across apartment rooftops.
They went through college with calm, shining eyes, experiencing visions of the state of Arkansas and William Blake's dazzling, tragic poetry while surrounded by academics who studied war.
They were kicked out of their universities for being mentally ill, and for publishing dirty poetry about holes in skulls (or writing dirty poetry on the windows of skull-like campus buildings).
They huddled in their underwear in unkempt rooms, setting their money on fire in wastebaskets while believing they heard a terrifying presence on the other side of the wall.
They got arrested in Laredo, Texas with facial hair that looked like pubic hair (or with drugs hidden in their crotch area) while smuggling marijuana in their belts from Mexico to New York.
They performed fire-eating stunts (or drank lots of firewater, a.k.a. alcohol) in cheap hotels. Or they drank turpentine in a rundown New York City apartment complex nicknamed Paradise Alley, either killing themselves or purging their bodies nightly through dreams, drug use, nightmarish hallucinations, drinking, and endless sex with men.
They saw amazing dark streets full of thunder and imaginary lightning that flashed from Canada to Paterson, New Jersey, lighting up all the quiet space and time in between.
They got high on the drug called peyote in hallways; experienced mornings that felt like death in green, tree-lined backyards; nights partying on rooftops while drunk on wine; storefronts, neon, and blinking traffic lights on stoned joyrides through New York City boroughs; cosmic vibrations from the sun, moon, and trees in the windy winter twilight of Brooklyn; rants around garbage cans (or rants as worthless as garbage); and the gentle, powerful illumination of their own minds.
They gripped and rode subway trains for what seemed like forever, traveling from New York City's Battery Park to the New York borough of the Bronx (which was sacred to them) while high on amphetamines, until the sounds of train wheels and children brought them down from their high. They shook, vomited, and felt beaten-up and empty-headed in the sad light of the Bronx Zoo.
They spent all night in the dim light of a cafeteria called Bickford's, feeling as if they were sinking underwater, then left and drank bad beer in the afternoon in a lonely bar called Fugazzi's, listening to a jukebox whose sounds shook them like a hydrogen bomb.
They talked without stopping for seventy hours, roaming in New York City from parks to apartments to bars to Bellevue Hospital to museums to the Brooklyn Bridge.
They're a lost group of philosophical talkers who (literally or figuratively) leapt off city stoops, fire escapes, windowsills, the Empire State Building, or the moon.
They babbled, yelled, and whispered facts, recollections, and stories, such as memories of being visually stimulated (or kicked in the eyes) and being shocked (receiving shock treatment, feeling shell-shocked, etc.) in mental hospitals, prisons, and wars.
They word-vomited everything they knew for a week straight, their eyes shining, as if vomiting kosher meat onto the sidewalk.
They disappeared into the Zen Buddhism-like emptiness of New Jersey, leaving behind only some mysterious postcards of the convention hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
They went through withdrawal from heroin (a drug sourced from Asia and associated by the poet with Tangier, Morocco, where an addicted friend lived) in a sad furnished room in Newark, New Jersey. They sweated, ground their teeth (or writhed their bony limbs), and suffered migraine headaches.
They roamed rail yards at midnight, unsure where to go. They went somewhere, and no one was especially sad that they left.
They smoked in freight trains that barreled through snowy landscapes toward remote farms in the ancient night.
They studied the ancient philosopher Plotinus, the writer Edgar Allan Poe, and the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross, as well as telepathic communication and a mix of bebop jazz and Jewish mysticism, in order to understand the mystical cosmic vibrations they felt on the ground in Kansas.
They walked alone through Idaho streets, hoping to find mystical American Indian angels—angels in a literal, not metaphorical, sense.
They thought Baltimore's magical, rapturous glow was only a product of their insane imaginations.
They climbed impulsively into limousines with Chinese men, on small-town Oklahoma roads with streetlights, because they were cold and wet on a rainy winter midnight.
They traveled slowly through Houston, Texas, alone and hungry, searching for jazz music, sex, or cheap food. They accompanied an extremely smart Spanish person for a while, talking about America and eternity, but these subjects proved impossibly difficult, so they sailed to Africa instead.
They vanished around Mexican volcanoes (possibly jumping into the craters on purpose). The only remaining traces of them were the shadowy memory of their blue jeans and the poetry they left behind, like volcanic dust and lava, in the fire-damaged city of Chicago.
They turned up again on the west coast of the U.S., conducting investigations into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They had beards, shorts, wide peaceful eyes, and attractive dark (or tanned) skin, and they handed out political pamphlets that made no sense.
They burned their arms with cigarettes as a gesture of protest against capitalism, which they felt was as dangerous and addictive as tobacco (and clouded people's judgment like cloudy tobacco smoke).
They handed out radical Communist literature in Union Square in New York City. They cried and tore their clothes off as approaching police sirens wailed like sirens at Los Alamos (an atomic bomb testing site), and wailed down Wall Street as the Staten Island Ferry made similar sounds.
They collapsed in tears in large, blank-walled rooms (e.g., in mental asylums), nude and fearful of the other gaunt, nude bodies around them.
When arrested, they bit the necks of police detectives and yelled joyfully in squad cars, feeling they were innocent of everything except wild sex with young men and wild drunkenness.
They knelt and screamed in subway stations, and they were arrested on rooftops while flaunting their naked bodies and pages of their writing.
They let male bikers perform anal sex on them, and they cried out ecstatically.
They gave and received oral sex with angel-like sailors, making love around the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.
They had sex in the morning, at night, in rose gardens, in parks, and in graveyards, orgasming with whoever, whenever.
They kept hiccuping (possibly from drinking) while trying to laugh, and ended up crying (or gasping) behind a wall in a bathhouse for gay men when a nude, blond, beautiful man came to penetrate them.
They lost their young male lovers to three old, unpleasant, one-eyed goddesses who controlled their destinies (like the three Fates in Greek mythology). The first represented American capitalism, a patriarchal system dominated by heterosexuals. The second represented sex with women, or heterosexuality itself. The third destroyed the works of artists and intellectuals (as if snipping threads on a loom, the way the third, deadly Fate snipped the thread of life).
These bohemians had joyful, insatiable sex with their lovers, surrounded by beer, cigarettes, and candles, falling off the bed and making love on the floor and in the hall. Finally, they collapsed against the wall, experiencing a vision of perfect sexual bliss before they passed out.
They sexually satisfied countless girls in the evening; they looked haggard in the morning, but they were still vigorous enough to sexually satisfy the sunrise itself. Their naked bodies could be seen having sex in barns and lakes.
They had casual sex (or prostituted themselves) as they traveled through Colorado in various cars they stole at night. Praise be to N.C. (Neal Cassady)—the secret hero of my poetry, the studly male god of Denver, Colorado—and the memory of his countless hookups with young women in vacant lots, the yards behind diners, the creaky rows of movie theaters, and mountain caves. And his lonely roadside hookups with skinny waitresses he knew, and especially private hookups in gas-station men's rooms and the backstreets of his hometown.
These bohemians vanished (or passed out) as if fading out in an epic dirty movie. Their dreams were like a scene change, and they awoke suddenly in Manhattan. They lurched out of basement dwellings, feeling hungover from harsh Tokay wine and cruel nightmares about (or on) Third Avenue, and lurched toward unemployment offices.
They walked all night on snowy docks by the East River in New York City, bleeding in their shoes and waiting for the door of a steam-filled opium den (drug users' hangout) to open.
They wrote dramas about suicide while living in (and/or imagined suicidally jumping from) the cliff-like apartment buildings on the Hudson River, as the moon shone on them like the searchlights used in World War II. They'll be awarded a crown of laurel flowers (a traditional prize for great poets) after death.
They feasted on their own imaginations as if on a hearty lamb stew, or ate crab fished from the muddy rivers near the Bowery neighborhood of New York City.
They cried at how romantic the city streets seemed, including the vendors selling (or passersby pushing) cartfuls of onions and playing bad music.
They lived in boxes under the bridge, inhaling the night air, then moved up to loft apartments to build harpsichords (piano-like instruments).
They coughed in a sixth-floor room of New York's Harlem neighborhood, amid orange crates full of books on theology, feeling crowned with holy fire under an unhealthy-looking (or blood-colored) sky.
They spent nights rocking back and forth while writing soaring poems and chants, which in the bright light of day turned out to be incoherent.
They cooked rotten meat (including animals' organs and tails), beet soup, and tortillas, while dreaming of a pure vegetarian lifestyle (or a heaven full of delicious vegetables).
They threw themselves under the wheels of meat trucks while searching for an egg (or, figuratively, got destroyed by powerful forces while trying to save something fragile).
They tossed their watches off their roofs to show, symbolically, that they cared more about eternal, spiritual matters than temporal, worldly things. But in a harsh reality check, alarm clocks woke them for work for the next ten years.
They tried and failed, three times straight, to commit suicide by slitting their wrists. Finally, they had to give up and open antique shops, which made them cry because they felt old (antique).
They went into the New York advertising business, which was so torturous that they felt burned alive in their nice work suits. They felt attacked by bad poetry; the aggressive, army-like conformity imposed by popular fashion; the explosive screaming of queer men in the advertising business; and the toxic attitudes of clever, creepy editors. Or else reality itself crushed them like a drunken taxi driver.
They leapt off the Brooklyn Bridge—this is a true story—survived, and disappeared anonymously into New York's Chinatown neighborhood, with its ghostly atmosphere, soup, alleys, and fire trucks. They didn't even get one free beer for the amazing thing they'd done.
They sang hopelessly out of their apartment windows, tumbled out of subway windows, jumped into the disgusting Passaic River, jumped onto Black people, wept in the streets, danced on shattered wine glasses in their bare feet, broke analog records of wistful German jazz music from the 1930s, drank the last of their whiskey, and moaned and puked up blood in bathrooms while hearing groaning noises and blaring steam whistles.
They zoomed down old familiar highways, traveling to each other's car wrecks or lonely prisons, or to be at each other's revelatory jazz performances in Birmingham, Alabama.
They drove for three days across the U.S. to find out if one of them had experienced a spiritual insight and to glimpse eternity.
They traveled to Denver, Colorado and died there; they returned and hopelessly waited there; they kept watch over the city, meditated and spent time alone there, and eventually left that timeless place for the ordinary world. Now the city misses the legends who used to visit her.
They knelt despairingly in cathedrals and prayed for the salvation of each other's souls and bodies, till they caught a brief, visionary glimpse of the soul.
They went out of their minds while imprisoned, waiting for legendary, golden-haired crooks who seemed charmingly authentic. They sang sweet, sad songs to the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
They withdrew to Mexico to take up a drug habit; or to Rocky Mount, North Carolina to practice Buddhism; or to Tangier, Morocco to be with young men; or to work on the black trains of the Southern Pacific Railroad; or to Harvard University to be narcissists; or to Woodlawn Cemetery (in New York City) to make daisy chains or visit graves.
They demanded sanity hearings, insisting that the radio was trying to hypnotize them, and wound up with mental health problems, empty hands, and an uncertain outcome.
They threw potato salad at professors of absurdist art at the City College of New York. Then they showed up on the stone steps of insane asylums, shaved bald, talking dramatically about suicide, and requesting immediate brain surgery for their mental illness.
Instead, they were subjected to treatments that left them feeling stony and hollow: insulin shock therapy, convulsions induced by the drug metrazol, electroshock therapy, hydrotherapy, psychotherapy, and occupational therapy. They played ping-pong for exercise in the asylum and suffered memory loss (from the treatments).
The only protest they could manage was to somberly topple a ping-pong table, as if toppling the establishment, then sit still and zone out for a while.
Years later, they came back—really bald this time, except for the blood, tears, and fingers on their heads as they clawed at themselves in distress—to the ominous wards of mental institutions in the Eastern U.S.
These included the stinking wards of New York's Pilgrim State Hospital, New York's Rockland State Hospital, and New Jersey's Greystone Park State Hospital. There, the bohemians argued with their inner voices, rocking back and forth in solitary, lovesick, late-night settings that resembled ancient stone tombs (dolmens). Their lives were like dreams turned to nightmares, and they felt weighed down as if they were made of rocks the size of the moon.
They'd finally done some equivalent of sleeping with their mothers (as in the Oedipus myth/Oedipus complex). They'd finally thrown the last trippy book out of their apartments, shut a final late-night door, hung up angrily on a last phone call, and cleared out their last room except for one small, imaginary item: a rose folded out of yellow paper and attached to a closet coat hanger. Even that was just an optimistic vision.
Oh, Carl Solomon, as long as you're in danger, I'm in danger, and now you're really "in the soup" (in trouble) in a cosmic sense.
For all these reasons, the bohemians ran through icy winter streets, excited about a new, magical -seeming mix of literary devices: the ellipsis, the poetic list (catalog), and irregular meter, combined with a mystical realm of cosmic vibrations.
Their dreamlike writing made revelatory disruptions in the space-time continuum through the juxtaposition of images. They paired visual images to capture the angelic nature of the soul. They combined verbs, nouns, and dashes in ways that seemed primal and sacred, evoking an all-powerful, eternal God.
Their poetic writing captured the rhythm and flow of humble human speech. They could address you, sounding tongue-tied, smart, fearfully ashamed, and scorned, but still pouring out an inner truth that corresponded to the flow of thoughts inside their bald heads and expansive minds.
They were poor, crazy, angelic Beats (bohemians) beaten down by life—anonymous, yet trying to write down what might still need to be said in the afterlife.
They were reincarnated as ghostly musicians at the shadowy edges of jazz bands. They played saxophones, turning America's lovesick suffering into a wail like Christ's cry from the cross ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), which made every radio in the city tremble.
They were like ritual sacrifices whose hearts had been cut out and could sustain people (in the form of poetry/art) for a thousand years.
II
What monster made of industrial materials (i.e., created by industrial society) destroyed these bohemians, as if breaking their heads open and devouring their intellects and imaginations?
The monster's name is Moloch! He consists of loneliness, dirt, ugliness, trash, and American greed! He makes children hide and scream, young soldiers cry, and old men sob in public parks!
Moloch, Moloch—the nightmarish, heartless, calculating, cruelly judgmental monster!
Moloch consists of bewildering prisons, deadly and inhumane jails, and American politicians who cause grief! It consists of buildings that are as harsh as divine judgment, the raw materials of huge wars, and paralyzed governments!
This monster is as calculating and cold as a machine! It's as greedy as if its blood were made of money! It's as violent as if its hands were made of armies! It seems to be driven by a bloodthirsty internal engine! It kills rather than listening, so that its ear is like a fiery grave!
The monster's eyes are a thousand dark, unseeing city windows! Its tall buildings are like countless biblical Gods! Its factories groan, emit fog, and seem to dream! It fills the city skyline with huge, smoking chimneys and broadcast antennas!
This monster's only love is for industrial minerals! Its only soul lies in power companies and financial institutions! The poverty it creates is like the ghost of the genius it's destroyed! It will cause nuclear war and mass sterility! It stands for pure mind (minus heart and soul)!
This monster (industrial capitalism) is the world in which I feel alone and dream of a divine presence! It's the world in which I feel insane, have sex with other men, and am starved for male companionship!
This monstrous presence became part of me in my youth! In it, I'm like a mind cut off from physical sensations! It scared me away from my innate sense of happiness! I flee from it, then wake up in it as light fills the sky!
Moloch, Moloch—this monster consists of inhumane, identical-looking city dwellings; ghostly suburban towns; government treasuries spent on deadly policies; great cities that lack foresight or understanding; hellishly cruel industries; countries that seem ghostly or demonic; inescapable mental hospitals; buildings like huge stone penises; and barbaric weapons of war!
The bohemians destroyed themselves trying to make this monster holy, as if raising its heavy cities—sidewalks, trees, radios, and all—toward Heaven, which already exists all around us anyway!
The bohemians' spiritual visions, superstitions, miraculous experiences, and raptures have all been lost to mainstream American culture! So have their dreams, loves, spiritual insights, faiths, and all that other poetic nonsense!
Their spiritual breakthroughs, changes and crucifixion-like agonies, drug highs, revelations, moments of hopelessness, raw howls, suicides, ideas, and new romances—the craziness of their generation—have all been lost over time, as if washed away in a flooding river and smashed against rocks!
They laughed sacred laughter in this "river" of mainstream culture! They saw and understood all of it, with their mad eyes and sacred screams! They said goodbye to it, leaping off rooftops, going off to be alone (possibly in death), waving and holding flowers, heading down the river or into the streets!
III
Carl Solomon, my friend! I'm with you (literally visiting you and/or figuratively supporting you) in the Rockland State Hospital, where you've been committed and are even more insane than I am.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you must be having a bizarre experience.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you're just like my ghostly mother (who's also been institutionalized).
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you've killed all twelve of your secretaries.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you appreciate this ghostly (or obscure or unseen) joke.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where we use the same terrible typewriter and feel that we're both brilliant authors.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where the radio is announcing how seriously ill you've become.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where the intellect and senses are disconnected (the body's sensations can't worm their way into the mind anymore).
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you drink tea that seems to come from the breasts of the old ladies of nearby Utica, New York.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you crack jokes about the bodies of your nurses, who are mean women from the Bronx.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you're restrained with a straitjacket and yell that you're losing a back-and-forth (ping-pong-like) struggle against despair.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you play a defunct (comatose-seeming) piano. The human soul is pure and eternal; it should never be destroyed in this unholy way, in an insane asylum with armed guards.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where even fifty more electroshock treatments will never reunite your body with its soul, which is suffering as if crucified into oblivion.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you claim your doctors are the real crazy people and plan a Jewish socialist rebellion against the American fascism that torments (crucifies) us all.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where you will burst open the sky of Long Island and escape, rising like a reincarnated Jesus Christ from a supernaturally powerful tomb.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, home of 25,000 crazy socialists, all singing the last verses of the left-wing anthem called "The Internationale."
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where we figuratively make love to America in our bed—the same America whose sickness keeps us up at night.
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital, where we're jolted out of unconsciousness by a vision of our own souls zooming like planes over the hospital roof. They've come to bombard us with holiness; as they do, the hospital lights up with a holy glow, and its walls crumble in the imagination. Oh, all you gaunt patients, escape to the outside! This sudden, blessed American event—a permanent, or permanently decisive, war (like the war in heaven before Judgment Day)—has arrived! Don't bother putting on your underwear (before running outside): we've won, we're free!
I'm with you in the Rockland State Hospital. I dream that you show up one night at my cottage in the Western U.S., drenched from a road trip across America that's like an ocean odyssey.
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“Howl” Themes
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Nonconformity vs. Mainstream Society
"Howl" celebrates people living at the margins of society, especially those whose sexuality, politics, spiritual beliefs, and/or mental health status placed them far outside mainstream American culture in the mid-20th century. For example, it celebrates gay men at a time when homosexuality was criminalized, socialist sympathizers at a time when such beliefs were often persecuted, and traumatized victims of "hospitals and jails and wars." Through its embrace of nonconformist individuals and identities, the poem proudly defies the values of mainstream American culture and highlights the bravery of those who dare to live freely and authentically in an unjust world.
The poem's heroes are outcasts and rebels living on the fringes of American society. The "minds" it celebrates (and mourns the loss of) include many figures rejected or persecuted by the white, straight, Christian, capitalist American mainstream, including gay men, Jewish Americans, believers in non-Western faith traditions, and socialist and communist sympathizers. The poem especially celebrates a type of figure it calls "hipsters," or "the madman bum and angel beat" (that is, the socially non-conforming artists who came to be called the Beat movement).
The poem's inclusion has limits, largely focusing on white men and seeming to imagine women and Black Americans as existing outside or at the fringes of this movement. Still, it generally celebrates people who have been excluded, belittled, and/or oppressed by mainstream culture. The poem sometimes affectionately teases its nonconformist "hipsters," but for the most part supports them and portrays them as tragic heroes.
And in celebrating these nonconformists, the poem passionately condemns the moral failings of the mainstream society they've rebelled against. It deems this society loveless, "sexless," "Robot[ic]," "demonic," and insatiably greedy for wealth and power. It also links official or mainstream institutions with violent oppression. For example, it associates police sirens with "Los Alamos" (the site of atomic bomb tests) and the advertising industry with "the iron regiments of fashion." In other words, it suggests that this society compels obedience and conformity as if by military force.
Rather than conforming to these terrible mainstream values, the poem suggests, the "rejected" beat figure seeks to follow his own code, or "conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head." And the poem stands in solidarity with these nonconformists, celebrating their adventures, mourning those who have died, and extending sympathy to those who are alive and suffering. It portrays them as legendary, or even "holy," figures and casts even their suffering in vivid, larger-than-life terms. It claims that those who died "rose reincarnate" in music, suggesting that their legacy lives on through art.
The poet specifically addresses the institutionalized writer Carl Solomon (and, by implication, others like him), offering loving support and the suggestion that their fates are intertwined ("while you are not safe I am not safe"). Through the refrain "I'm with you," the speaker makes it clear that he's not only on the side of these nonconformists but is one of them himself.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Before Line 1
- Lines 1-78
- Between Lines 78-79
- Lines 79-93
- Between Lines 93-94
- Lines 94-112
- After Line 112
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The Oppressive Violence of the American System
"Howl" not only celebrates its freethinking heroes but also furiously condemns the American political and economic system that ground them down. The speaker personifies this system—made up of industrial capitalism, the American war machine, and mainstream culture in general—as a monstrous figure called "Moloch." Readers can think of Moloch as something like "the Man" or "the power" (as in the phrase "Fight the Power"), a greedy, heartless, and deeply destructive entity that the poem's heroes tried and failed to escape. The soullessness of the American system, the poem argues, has crushed anything spiritually sustaining or redemptive, turning society into a "Nightmare" full of "screaming," "weeping," and needless suffering.
The America of this poem is a violent, war-hungry monster built on the backs of the poor, where money rules all and where production, profit, and power matter more than human lives. The speaker rejects American capitalism (an economic system in which private, profit-driven entities, rather than the government, control a nation's industry) as a "narcotic tobacco haze"—a dangerous, addictive, and stupor-inducing drug. The country's "fingers are ten armies," meaning America exerts its grip on the world through violence and wars into which "sobbing" young men are conscripted. Cities are made ugly by factories and pollution, and the threat of nuclear annihilation hangs over society. The poor and mentally ill, meanwhile, are left behind or subjected to state-sanctioned violence.
The system's violence and human indifference fell especially hard, the poem suggests, on those artist and rebel figures who sought higher truths and human connection (they experienced "the suffering of America's naked mind for love"). Though they tried to defeat the system with love, imagination, and creativity, there was no room for these things in a society whose soul consists of only "electricity and banks." As such, Moloch "ate up" these rebels' "brains and imagination." And now, "Visions," "miracles," "ecstasies," and the like have disappeared "down the American river."
Nevertheless, in empathizing with one particular victim of this system, the poem continues to offer hope for a future that breaks free of "Moloch." In addressing the writer Carl Solomon directly, the poem acknowledges his suffering "in an armed madhouse" but repeatedly offers sympathy and companionship ("I'm with you"). It also dreams of grandly optimistic scenarios, such as Solomon bursting forth from confinement like a god ("resurrect[ing] your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb"). It imagines a scene of rapturous "victory" and liberation at the mental hospital—symbolically, a victory over broader social repression. Finally, it dreams of a reunion between the poet and Solomon: a redemptive ending to a painful "journey [...] across America," which may symbolize the journey of America itself.
In all these ways, despite its nightmare vision of American (or global) industrialized capitalism, the poem refuses to despair and continues to envision a better world.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 31-35
- Line 56
- Lines 66-67
- Line 77
- Lines 79-93
- Lines 107-112
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Madness and Visionary Thinking
"Howl" is a lament for "the best minds of [Ginsburg's] generation": a set of artists and thinkers whom the poet/speaker believes were "destroyed by madness.” The poem doesn't blame such "madness" on random misfortune or the sufferers themselves, however, but rather portrays its heroes as being driven mad by their oppressive, violent society. In fact, it suggests that this society is what's truly mad and that the only "sane" people in it are those who rebel against it. The poem's heroes attempt to do so through things like drugs, sex, art, and mysticism. Though these attempts are often failed and/or self-destructive, the poem views them as noble—and suggests that they offer greater imaginative and spiritual illumination than a "sane" mainstream lifestyle ever could.
The poem is framed as a "howl" of grief over the "madness" that "destroyed" its rebellious heroes. It suggests that many of these rebels experienced real mental health struggles and, in some cases, died. For those who were treated, it suggests that the treatment was worse than the disease; it portrays the era's "madhouse[s]" as cruel, degrading, and ineffective.
But this “madness," the speaker insists, is actually the consequence of living in a society (personified as a monster called Moloch) that is itself truly, violently insane. The poem accuses this society, with its fixation on money and war, of "bash[ing] open their skulls and [eating] up their brains and imagination." In other words, society's greed and lust for power crushed these heroes psychologically, intellectually, and creatively.
The speaker suggests both that this society drives people mad and that it deems nonconforming rebels crazy. One of these rebels is the poet's friend Carl Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated and whose confinement in a mental hospital it describes. The speaker expresses solidarity with the "mad" Solomon as he "accuse[s his] doctors of insanity," favoring his fellow writer's definition of insanity (i.e., Solomon's) over his society's.
At the same time, the poem celebrates the imaginative and spiritual visions of these doomed rebels. It suggests that these “mad” people have actually experienced powerful revelations while defying their society's definition of "sanity." The poem depicts these people as chasing—and often achieving—lofty "visions" and "ecstasies" through sex, drugs ("Highs! Epiphanies!"), art and music ("jazz incarnation"), etc. It sometimes affectionately depicts their attempts as failed or resulting in "gibberish." Fundamentally, though, it casts them as spiritual questers, eager "to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision [...] to find out Eternity."
Generally, then, the poem acknowledges the actual mental health problems of its heroes while implying that they're actually saner than the society they inhabit. In fact, it frames the terrible flaws of that society as largely responsible for their desperation, alienation, and breakdowns, and argues that these rebels have access to a higher, more visionary form of knowledge than those who would call them crazy.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Before Line 1
- Lines 1-78
- Between Lines 78-79
- Lines 79-93
- Between Lines 93-94
- Lines 94-112
- After Line 112
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Howl”
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Line 1
I saw the ... starving hysterical naked,
The opening line of "Howl" establishes the poem's main idea and its basic style. This poem will be about a group of brilliant people—"the best minds of [the speaker's] generation"—who were "destroyed by madness," driven insane to the point where they found themselves desperate and degraded ("starving hysterical naked").
The phrase "best minds" refers primarily to the circle of experimental, anti-establishment writers and artists known as the Beat Generation (a term coined by Allen Ginsberg's friend, the novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, in the 1940s). The poem will go on to recount the adventures and hardships of these rebellious figures (whom the poem also calls "hipsters").
"Madness" refers partly to their real-life mental health problems, but also to what Ginsberg views as the insanity of their repressive society. The poem will suggest that this society either drives its "best minds" crazy as they struggle against it, defines their higher intellectual/spiritual understanding as irrational, or both.
This opening line is long and rhythmically loose, almost like prose, but its line break marks it as verse. Although "Howl" is a free verse poem (i.e., it has no rhyme scheme or meter), it incorporates a number of literary devices—such as alliteration, assonance, and anaphora—that give it an intensely musical quality. That quality first appears in the alliteration and assonance of "minds"/"my"/"madness." Meanwhile, the phrase "starving hysterical naked" omits a connecting "and" (an example of asyndeton) as well as commas. The poem's unorthodox grammar and punctuation, along with its rejection of rhyme and meter, reflect its free-spirited rebellion against social and literary conventions of all kinds.
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Lines 2-3
dragging themselves through ...
... machinery of night, -
Lines 4-5
who poverty and ...
... tenement roofs illuminated, -
Lines 6-7
who passed through ...
... of the skull, -
Lines 8-9
who cowered in ...
... for New York, -
Lines 10-11
who ate fire ...
... and endless balls, -
Lines 12-13
incomparable blind streets ...
... light of mind, -
Lines 14-15
who chained themselves ...
... the hydrogen jukebox, -
Lines 16-19
who talked continuously ...
... on the pavement, -
Lines 20-22
who vanished into ...
... no broken hearts, -
Lines 23-26
who lit cigarettes ...
... in supernatural ecstasy, -
Lines 27-29
who jumped in ...
... in fireplace Chicago, -
Lines 30-32
who reappeared on ...
... ferry also wailed, -
Lines 33-35
who broke down ...
... genitals and manuscripts, -
Lines 36-39
who let themselves ...
... with a sword, -
Line 40
who lost their ... the craftsman’s loom,
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Lines 41-43
who copulated ecstatic ...
... hometown alleys too, -
Lines 44-46
who faded out ...
... laurel in oblivion, -
Lines 47-52
who ate the ...
... pure vegetable kingdom, -
Lines 53-56
who plunged themselves ...
... of Absolute Reality, -
Lines 57-58
who jumped off ...
... of colossal steamwhistles, -
Lines 59-61
who barreled down ...
... for her heroes, -
Lines 62-64
who fell on ...
... daisychain or grave, -
Lines 65-68
who demanded sanity ...
... briefly in catatonia, -
Lines 69-72
returning years later ...
... soup of time— -
Lines 73-75
and who therefore ...
... and endless head, -
Lines 76-78
the madman bum ...
... a thousand years. -
Lines 79-82
What sphinx of ...
... the stunned governments! -
Lines 83-85
Moloch whose mind ...
... is the Mind! -
Lines 86-88
Moloch in whom ...
... cocks! monstrous bombs! -
Lines 89-93
They broke their ...
... into the street! -
Lines 94-99
Carl Solomon! I’m ...
... same dreadful typewriter -
Lines 100-105
I’m with you ...
... an armed madhouse -
Lines 106-109
I’m with you ...
... of the Internationale -
Lines 110-112
I’m with you ...
... the Western night
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“Howl” Symbols
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Moloch/Sphinx
"Moloch," the monster in part II of "Howl," symbolizes the heartless society or system the poem's heroes inhabit. It's the equivalent of a concept like "the Man," "the system," or "the power" (as in "Fight the Power"). The poem links this system with the politics, mainstream culture, and capitalist economy of America in particular. More broadly, Moloch represents modern, capitalist, militarized, industrial society the world over.
The name "Moloch" alludes to a Canaanite god who is denounced in the Bible (mainly the Book of Leviticus) and associated with child sacrifice. A version of this mythical figure appears in other works as well:
- For example, Moloch is one of Satan's warrior-angels in John Milton's Paradise Lost and a hideous, mechanical monster/god in Fritz Lang's urban-dystopia film Metropolis (1927).
- In Theories of Surplus Value (1862-'63), Karl Marx—the economist, philosopher, and founder of the socialist/communist theory known as Marxism—referred to finance capital as "a Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right."
Ginsberg's version of Moloch seems inspired by Lang and Marx, especially. He described the Moloch section of the poem as "the monster vision" and "naturalistic observation of the industrial landscape [condensed] into hyperbolic images of metropolitan apocalypse."
Moloch is traditionally depicted with the head of a bull, but the poem imagines Moloch as more like a "sphinx" (a hybrid lion/human/bird from Egyptian and Greek mythology). In any case, the Moloch of the poem is more of a concept than a creature. It has a godlike presence (it's a "heavy judger of men," creates skyscrapers "like endless Jehovahs," etc.), but rather than a force of goodness, wisdom, or mercy, it's a crushing, "loveless" force of violence and greed. It seems to demand the sacrifice of "genius," condemning rebellious thinkers to "poverty," "suicides," "animal screams," and other kinds of suffering and death. It also destroys the creations, insights, and spiritual experiences of these rebels, selling their "Visions," "miracles," "Dreams," "illuminations," and so on "down the American river" as if they were no more than "a boatload of sensitive bullshit."
Basically, Moloch stands for everything that "destroyed" the poem's heroes: the rebellious bohemians who collapsed into "madness." In the poem's view, these sensitive, intelligent, artistic souls were victims of an evil society that effectively "ate up their brains and imagination."
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 79-93: “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 judgment! 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 Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks 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 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!”
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“Howl” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Anaphora
Anaphora is a hugely important part of "Howl"—the device that lends this free verse poem some structure by tying together the long, loose, wildly varying lines in each of the poem's three sections. The poem contains no meter or rhyme scheme, but anaphora gives it a sense of organization that helps readers follow its surreal twists and turns. In fact, the repeated words/phrases at the beginnings of lines help establish the theme of each section:
- Most lines in Part I begin with "who" followed by a verb, so that the section becomes an extended lament for (and celebration of) the poem's heroes, their adventures, and their sufferings.
- Most lines in Part II begin with "Moloch," so that the section becomes a long tirade against this monster and the society it symbolizes.
- Most lines in Part III begin with "I'm with you in Rockland" (usually followed by some version of "where you [...]"), so that the section becomes an extended message of sympathy, support, and comfort for Carl Solomon.
Some anaphora also occurs within lines, in sequences of parallel phrases or clauses. Notice, for example, the repeated "with"s in line 11:
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares [...]
And the repeated "& the"s in line 56:
[...] & 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
In addition to lending the poem structure, anaphora also adds rhythm to the poem. As the repeated words/phrases pile up, the poem can sound like a spiritual chant, an angry rant, or a soothing reassurance (depending on context!).
The way these repetitions provide a baseline for free-flowing improvisations also resembles the structure of jazz, a genre that the poem repeatedly mentions and that Ginsberg cited as an inspiration. Each section contains at least some variation at the beginning of lines, which prevents the anaphora from becoming too predictable or boring.
Where anaphora appears in the poem:- Line 4: “who”
- Line 5: “who”
- Line 6: “who”
- Line 7: “who”
- Line 8: “who”
- Line 9: “who”
- Line 10: “who”
- Line 11: “with,” “with,” “with”
- Line 14: “who”
- Line 15: “who”
- Line 16: “who”
- Line 20: “who”
- Line 22: “who”
- Line 23: “who”
- Line 24: “who”
- Line 25: “who”
- Line 26: “who”
- Line 27: “who”
- Line 28: “who”
- Line 29: “who”
- Line 30: “who”
- Line 31: “who”
- Line 32: “who”
- Line 33: “who”
- Line 34: “who”
- Line 35: “who ”
- Line 36: “who”
- Line 38: “who”
- Line 39: “who”
- Line 40: “who”
- Line 41: “who”
- Line 42: “who”
- Line 43: “who”
- Line 44: “who”
- Line 45: “who”
- Line 46: “who”
- Line 47: “who”
- Line 48: “who”
- Line 49: “who”
- Line 50: “who”
- Line 51: “who”
- Line 52: “who”
- Line 53: “who”
- Line 54: “who”
- Line 55: “who”
- Line 56: “who,” “& the,” “& the,” “& the”
- Line 57: “who”
- Line 58: “who”
- Line 59: “who”
- Line 60: “who”
- Line 61: “who,” “who,” “who,” “who”
- Line 62: “who”
- Line 63: “who,” “who”
- Line 64: “who”
- Line 65: “who”
- Line 66: “who”
- Line 67: “who”
- Line 68: “who”
- Line 71: “and,” “and,” “and,” “and,” “and”
- Line 73: “who”
- Line 74: “who”
- Line 80: “Moloch”
- Line 81: “Moloch,” “Moloch,” “Moloch the”
- Line 82: “Moloch the,” “Moloch the,” “Moloch,” “Moloch the,” “Moloch the”
- Line 83: “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose”
- Line 84: “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose”
- Line 85: “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose”
- Line 86: “Moloch in whom,” “Moloch in whom”
- Line 87: “Moloch,” “Moloch,” “Moloch,” “Moloch”
- Line 88: “Moloch,” “Moloch”
- Line 93: “They,” “the,” “the,” “They,” “They”
- Lines 94-94: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you’re”
- Lines 95-95: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 96-96: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 97-97: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you’ve”
- Lines 98-98: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 99-99: “I’m with you in Rockland / where”
- Lines 100-100: “I’m with you in Rockland / where your”
- Lines 101-101: “I’m with you in Rockland / where”
- Lines 102-102: “I'm with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 103-103: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 104-104: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 105-105: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 106-106: “I’m with you in Rockland / where”
- Lines 107-107: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 108-108: “I’m with you in Rockland / where you”
- Lines 109-109: “I’m with you in Rockland / where”
- Lines 110-110: “I’m with you in Rockland / where”
- Lines 111-111: “I’m with you in Rockland / where”
- Line 111: “O,” “O,” “O”
- Line 112: “I’m with you in Rockland”
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Repetition
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Apostrophe
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Personification
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Imagery
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Asyndeton
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Metaphor
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Irony
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Allusion
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Hyperbole
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Rhetorical Question
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"Howl" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Carl Solomon
- Hysterical
- Madness/Mad/Madder
- Negro streets
- Fix
- Dynamo
- Angelheaded
- Cold-water flats
- The El
- Mohammedan
- Illuminated/Illuminating/Illuminations/Illuminates
- Tenement
- Blake-light
- Odes
- Unshaven
- The Terror
- Busted
- Pubic beards
- Laredo
- Paint hotels
- Paradise Alley
- Turpentine
- Purgatoried
- Paterson
- Peyote solidities
- Teahead
- Boroughs
- Ashcan
- Battery
- Bronx
- Benzedrine
- Mouth-wracked
- Drear
- Bickford's
- Submarine
- Fugazzi's
- Hydrogen jukebox
- Bellevue
- Platonic
- Battalion
- Empire State
- Yacketayakking
- Eyeball kicks
- Disgorged
- Meat for the Synagogue
- Zen
- Atlantic City Hall
- Junk-withdrawal
- Eastern sweats/Tangerian bone-grindings/Migraines of China
- Newark's
- Boxcars
- Grandfather night
- Bop kabbalah
- Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross
- Loned it
- Indian angels
- Dungarees
- Pacifist
- Narcotic
- Capitalism
- Union Square
- Supercommunist
- Los Alamos
- Wall
- Staten Island ferry
- Pederasty
- Seraphim
- Balled
- Turkish Bath
- Shrews of fate
- Loveboys
- Loom
- Copulated
- Insatiate
- Gyzym
- Snatch
- Myriad
- Cocksman and Adonis
- Solipsisms
- Johns
- Sordid
- Tokay
- Third Avenue
- East River
- Opium
- Hudson
- Floodlight
- Laurel
- Bowery
- Pushcarts
- Harpsichords
- Tubercular
- Harlem
- Orange crates of theology
- Incantations
- Borsht
- Leaden verse
- Tanked-up
- Regiments
- Fairies of advertising
- Nitroglycerine
- Mustard gas
- Chinatown
- Passaic
- Phonograph
- Steamwhistles
- Jail-solitude
- Hotrod-Golgotha
- Incarnation/Incarnate/Reincarnate
- Birmingham
- In vain
- Salvation
- Alcatraz
- Rocky Mount
- Tangiers
- Southern Pacific
- Narcissus
- Woodlawn
- Daisychain
- Sanity trials
- Hung jury
- Dadaism
- CCNY
- Harlequin
- Instantaneous lobotomy
- Pingpong
- Amnesia
- Insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy
- Catatonia/Catatonic
- Madtowns
- Foetid
- Pilgrim State, Rockland, Greystone
- Solitude-bench
- Dolmen-realms
- ******
- Fantastic
- Alchemy
- Ellipsis
- Vibrating plane
- Variable measure
- Catalogue
- Juxtaposed
- Archangel
- Elemental
- Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
- Syntax and measure
- Beat
- Goldhorn
- Eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani
- Sphinx
- Moloch
- Crossbone
- Jehovahs
- Specter/Spectral
- Sexless hydrogen
- Treasuries
- Invincible
- Adorations
- Crucifixions
- Epiphanies
- Highs
- Shade
- Faculties
- Spinsters
- Utica
- Harpies
- The Abyss
- Straightjacket
- Ungodly
- Shocks
- Pilgrimage
- Fascist national Golgotha
- Hebrew socialist revolution
- Comrades
- The Internationale
- Legions
- Sea-journey
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(Location in poem: Before Line 1: “For Carl Solomon”; Line 72: “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—”; Line 94: “Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland”)
A writer and friend of Allen Ginsberg, who met him at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Solomon was hospitalized more than once for mental illness (though never at Rockland State Hospital, the "Rockland" in the poem), and he later described some of these experiences in the essay "Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Howl”
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Form
"Howl" is a free verse poem whose 112 lines are broken up into three sections. This three-part structure imposes some order and logic on an otherwise sprawling poem about "madness":
- Part I is a lament for doomed bohemians (Ginsberg's friends).
- Part II is an outcry against the society ("Moloch") that "destroyed" these people.
- Part III is an expression of sympathy with one friend in particular (Carl Solomon).
In general, the poem's lines are quite long, packed with details, images, and allusions. Some individual lines contain so much detail that they're almost like short poems or stories in their own right (these ultra-long lines also often look more like paragraphs, depending on what printing of the poem readers are looking at). This free-flowing form does a few important things:
- First, it reinforces the idea that "Howl" is not a tidy work of art but a howl—of grief, rage, and sometimes exultation.
- Second, it allows the poet to paint an extensive picture of the poem's characters and their experiences. "Howl" is largely an elegy or lament; by providing so much detail about the dead or suffering bohemians, the poet helps the reader understand and sympathize with them. Imagine trying to squeeze all that detail into a short form, like a sonnet!
- Third, the poem's form mirrors, to some degree, the "madness" of its characters; it's the kind of outpouring of speech described in lines 18-19 ("yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes," etc.).
- Finally, it suggests that the poet/speaker is experiencing a rush of inspiration.
Also note that, rather than a meter or rhyme scheme, the poem uses anaphora—repeated words/phrases at the beginning of lines—to help organize the speaker's thoughts. For example, Part I consists of a single (very) long sentence, broken into lines that mostly begin with the word "who." Most of the lines in Part II then begin with "Moloch," while all of the lines in Part II begin with the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland" (except for line 94, which inserts "Carl Solomon!" before this phrase).
All this repetition adds some more structure to the poem, and it also has a hypnotic effect. It's as though the poet/speaker is speaking out of a trance or visionary state, which is fitting for a poem that includes so many references to visions, dreams, and "illuminations,"
Over the years, Ginsberg named a variety of sources as inspirations for the form of "Howl." He said that the poem's expansive free verse drew from the writings of Walt Whitman (a major 19th-century American poet) and that its "long saxophone-like chorus lines" derived from bebop jazz music. He also claimed to have been inspired by "Hebraic-Melvillean bardic breath," suggesting that both ancient Hebrew scriptures and 19th-century novelist Herman Melville (author of the famously long and poetic Moby-Dick) influenced the poem's shape. For good measure, Ginsberg added that "a lot of [the poem's] forms developed out of an extreme rhapsodic wail I once heard in a madhouse."
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Meter
"Howl" is written in free verse, meaning that it doesn't follow a regular meter or rhyme scheme. Instead, it uses long, unrhymed lines of varying length, structured through other kinds of repetition (especially anaphora).
The "freedom" of the poem's verse reflects its themes of rebellion and escape. The poem's heroes seek liberation from social constraints and oppression, as well as release from the literal "madhouse[s]" to which some of them are confined. They rebel against American society—a supposedly free country that they've found to be anything but—and dream of "revolution" against the system of industrial capitalism in general.
As a way of dramatizing this (imagined or attempted) rebellion, Ginsberg rebels against the conventions of English-language poetry, including standard metrical patterns. This approach was characteristic of his literary movement, the Beat Generation, which typically shunned meter and rhyme in favor of loose, improvisatory, jazz-inspired rhythms.
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Rhyme Scheme
As a free verse poem, "Howl" has no rhyme scheme. It's structured around anaphora, meaning that it often repeats words and phrases at the beginning of lines, leaving the rest of the line to soar off in unpredictable directions. (The poem does use some internal rhyme, however, as in the phrase "midnight streetlight" in line 27 and the slant rhyme "the holy yells! They bade farewell!" in line 93.)
As with the lack of meter, the lack of rhyme in "Howl" is characteristic of Beat Generation poetry. Beat poets such as Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso took the "free" in "free verse" seriously, seeing their rejection of conventional poetic patterns as aligned with their rejection of social conformity in general. As models for their poetic rhythms, they drew on sources ranging from the free verse of William Blake (1757-1827) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892) to the intense, often improvised sounds of bebop jazz.
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“Howl” Speaker
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The speaker of "Howl" represents the poet Allen Ginsberg himself. Many details in the poem make this connection clear. For example:
- The poem is dedicated to Ginsberg's friend and fellow writer Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met in a mental hospital.
- The speaker says that Solomon, in the hospital, "imitate[s] the shade of my mother" (line 96): a reference to Ginsberg's mother Naomi, who was institutionalized for a number of years prior to her death. (Ginsberg explores this topic in depth in other poems.)
- The poem contains numerous details based on the real-life experiences of Ginsberg's friends and associates, as he explained in his author's notes on the poem.
All that said, some of the poem's details are exaggerated or fictionalized (for example, neither Solomon nor Ginsberg spent time in Rockland State Hospital; Ginsberg chose the name "Rockland" for its sonic and symbolic qualities). Thus, while the poem is largely autobiographical, it doesn't confine itself to strict biographical fact. In lamenting "the best minds of [his] generation," Ginsberg often portrays them in mystical or legendary terms—in other words, he takes some poetic license.
The first-person speaker ("I") appears in the first word of the poem but doesn't explicitly reappear until line 72 ("ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—"). That's because Part I focuses mainly on Ginsberg's friends and fellow bohemians, the "minds [...] destroyed by madness." (However, Ginsberg does weave some of his own real-life experiences into the descriptions of this third-person "they," so "they," at times, is more like "we.") The first-person speaker appears more extensively in Part II of the poem (where "I" is the individual voice railing against society, or "Moloch"), and appears in every line of Part III (which directly addresses Solomon in sympathetic terms). The poem thus becomes more personal as it goes on, narrowing from a portrait of a "generation"—and a condemnation of a whole society—down to a message for a single friend.
The poet/speaker not only sympathizes with Solomon and other "mad" friends; he clearly considers himself one of them. The line "ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe" suggests that the two men are threatened by the same society, while "you're madder than I am" (line 94) indicates that, while not currently institutionalized, the speaker is still insane by that society's standards. The rant in Part II makes clear that this monstrous society—"Moloch," a stand-in for industrial capitalism or 20th-century America—has left him alienated, "lonely," and "Crazy" according to mainstream definitions. He's especially alienated as a gay man in a homophobic culture, and he turns his back on that culture's values ("Moloch whom I abandon!").
Throughout Part III, he expresses solidarity with, and support for, his hospitalized friend ("I'm with you"), while seeming to envision some ultimate liberation from their repressive society. The poem's ending (line 112) takes readers directly into the speaker's "dreams," which reunite Ginsberg—who really did live in a "cottage" at the time—with the long-suffering Solomon.
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“Howl” Setting
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The setting of "Howl" ranges widely, as the poem refers to a variety of locations around New York City, the U.S., and the globe.
This dizzying assortment of place names highlights the restlessness of the poem's heroes, who are constantly journeying in search of spiritual illumination, freedom from their repressive society, or both. In a possible allusion to Homer's Odyssey, the final line of "Howl" even imagines Carl Solomon as an Odysseus-like figure, freshly returned from a cross-country trip that is also, somehow, a "sea-journey."
The poem's main setting shifts slightly from section to section:
- Part I is set primarily in and around New York City, whose geography and features it references extensively.
- For example, it mentions the boroughs of "Brooklyn," the "Bronx," and "Staten Island"; "Battery" Park, "Harlem," and the "Bowery" neighborhood; the "Hudson" River and "East River," etc. Some of these features (such as "the El," "Bickford's," and "Fugazzi's") no longer exist, marking the poem as a product of the immediate post-WWII period.
- Part I also mentions various other places in the U.S. (e.g., "Baltimore," "Birmingham," "Chicago," "Idaho," "Kansas," "Alcatraz," etc.), North America (e.g., "Canada" and "Mexico"), and the world (e.g., "Africa"). The references to "Tangiers" and "Africa" specifically allude to Ginsberg's friend, the Beat writer William Burroughs, who lived in Tangier, Morocco during this period.
- Part II was originally inspired by the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, California, a building Ginsberg envisioned as a many-eyed monster during a drug-fueled hallucination. However, Part II never explicitly mentions the hotel or city, and it seems to encompass the modern urban landscape in general ("Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!") or the modern industrialized world as a whole ("spectral nations!").
- Part III is set "in Rockland," or the Rockland State Hospital (now the Rockland Psychiatric Center), a mental hospital founded in 1926 in Orangeburg, New York, not far from New York City. (Neither Ginsberg nor Solomon was ever actually committed there, though they spent time in other institutions.) The final line also mentions Ginsberg's "cottage in the Western night"; Ginsberg actually lived in a cottage in Berkeley, California during this period.
Along with all these physical locations, the poem takes place during a clear time period. Ginsberg noted that the phrase "Ten years' animal screams and suicides!" (line 92) refers to the years 1945-1955, which also correspond to most of the poem's cultural references. Thus, the poem is primarily a portrait of America, and its "best minds," during the decade just after World War II.
- Part I is set primarily in and around New York City, whose geography and features it references extensively.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Howl”
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Literary Context
"Howl" (1956) is widely regarded as the central poem of the Beat movement of the 1940s and 1950s. The Beats were a close-knit circle of writers and artists drawn to radical politics, sexual exploration, drug experimentation, radical politics, non-traditional forms of spirituality, and art and music (e.g., bebop jazz) produced by artists outside the American mainstream. Much of their work sought to shock, provoke, and rebel against what they viewed as the repressed consumer culture of post-World War II America. The term "Beat" was coined by another leading figure of the movement, the poet/novelist Jack Kerouac, who adapted it from the Black American slang term "beat to his socks" (i.e., beaten down).
Other Beat writers include novelist William Burroughs, poet/publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who first published Howl and Other Poems, and Carl Solomon, the dedicatee of "Howl," whose essay Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient (1950) influenced Ginsberg's poem. Equally influential were the real-world experiences of the Beats, such as Solomon's and Ginsberg's stints in mental hospitals, Ginsberg's experiments with psychedelic drugs, and the sexual and criminal exploits of Neal Cassady, the counterculture figure memorialized as "N.C." in "Howl."
Ginsberg composed and revised "Howl" over the course of 1954 and 1955. He first performed it publicly on October 7, 1955, at a now-legendary reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, California. The poem caused a sensation among the audience, and Ferlinghetti promptly offered to publish it. Yet along with praise from various literary figures, "Howl" attracted controversy due to its graphic language, radical politics, and frank depiction of homosexuality.
When the book Howl and Other Poems debuted in 1956, Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao (co-owners of the City Lights bookstore) were arrested for distributing obscene literature. The pair were acquitted the following year, as a judge deemed "Howl" a constitutionally protected work of "redeeming social importance." The incident brought considerable notoriety to the Beat movement, which went on to produce such classics as Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957) and Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch (1959)—the second of which, like "Howl," sparked an obscenity trial.
Besides his Beat peers, Ginsberg named many literary forerunners as influences on "Howl," including:
- The English Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827; see line 6: "Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war");
- The American novelist Herman Melville (1819-1891);
- And the American poets Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963).
"Howl" also draws inspiration from music, visual art, and film. The poem's loose form was influenced by jazz, especially the experimental sub-genre of jazz called "bebop." As a model of the effect the poem was aiming for, Ginsberg pointed to jazz saxophonist Lester Young "[performing] in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of 'The Man I Love' until everyone in the hall was out of his head."
The poem also contains subtle references to the work of French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), whose sharp color contrasts helped inspire the startling contrasts of "Howl." As for film, Ginsberg cited "Moloch" in the dystopian classic Metropolis (1927) as an influence on his own "Moloch"; he also mentioned Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) as an influence on the "comic realism" of the poem.
Historical Context
"Howl" offers a surreal yet richly detailed portrait of the U.S. during the decade after World War II. As Ginsberg acknowledged, the "Ten years" mentioned in the poem refers to the years between 1945 (when WWII ended) and 1955 (when he finished writing "Howl"). During this period, the U.S. was booming economically but remained deeply repressive for those living outside its dominant (white, Christian, heterosexual, patriarchal) culture.
"Howl" debuted just as the 20th-century civil rights movement was getting off the ground, and several years prior to the arrival of second-wave feminism and the modern LGBTQ liberation movement in the 1960s. The poem's rage against the machine it names "Moloch" reflects brewing social conflicts that now seem old-fashioned in some ways—and familiar in others.
During this period, homosexuality was both criminalized and viewed as a psychiatric disorder. Psychiatric treatments were often crude and severely damaging; they included an early form of "electroshock therapy" (see line 106: "[...] where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void") and the drastic brain surgery known as "lobotomy" (see line 66: "[...] demanding instantaneous lobotomy").
Mental hospitals were rife with other abuses as well, and Ginsberg had firsthand knowledge of such institutions:
- His mother, Naomi, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had been hospitalized throughout much of Ginsberg's youth. She was lobotomized toward the end of her life and died in an institution shortly after her son completed "Howl."
- Ginsberg, too, had been institutionalized in 1949-'50, as part of a plea deal in connection with a theft to which he was an accessory. During his seven months in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, doctors sought to "cure" his homosexuality with psychotherapy. It was also in this facility that he met Carl Solomon.
The combination of his own experience, his mother's, and Solomon's caused Ginsberg to question how his society defined "madness" and "sanity"—questions that became central to the poem that made his name.
Even as Ginsberg's society viewed him and others like him as "mad," Ginsberg viewed his society itself as irrational in many ways:
- Over the course of two world wars, for example, America's military and private industry had developed a relationship that President Dwight Eisenhower, in a famous warning at the end of the 1950s, would call the "military-industrial complex." This "complex" had developed a series of increasingly deadly weapons of mass destruction, including the atomic and the hydrogen bomb.
- As the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union escalated in the 1950s, these inventions prompted widespread fears of nuclear annihilation (alluded to by the "cloud of sexless hydrogen" in line 85). Ginsberg saw the American war machine ("the vast stone of war!") as insanely destructive, and "Howl" denounces the "demonic industries" and "monstrous bombs" it spawned.
Raised in a radically left-wing family, Ginsberg also viewed industrial capitalism, and the American culture it produced, as monstrously oppressive. Along with other literary sources, Ginsberg's "Moloch" may allude to the writings of socialist/communist philosopher Karl Marx, who referred to finance capital by that name. "Howl" specifically criticizes the stifling consumer culture of the advertising industry ("Madison Avenue"), the greed of the energy and finance industries ("oil and stone [...] electricity and banks"), and the ugliness of mechanized, industrial civilization as a whole—the "sphinx of cement and aluminum" that it blames for destroying the minds of artists.
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More “Howl” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Out Loud — Listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" live in 1959.
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The Poet's Life and Work — Read a biography of Ginsberg at the Poetry Foundation.
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The Impact of "Howl" — A 2010 retrospective on "How 'Howl' Changed the World."
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"Howl" and Censorship — More context on the controversy surrounding the taboo-breaking publication of "Howl."
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An Interview with the Poet — Watch Conan O'Brien interviewing Ginsberg in 1994.
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An Introduction to the Beats — Read "A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets," courtesy of Poets.org.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
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