Howl (1956). Summary and Description

“Howl,” the title piece from Ginsberg’s breakthrough collection, was completed in 1956 and circulated in pamphlet form throughout the San Francisco poetry renaissance scene before being formally published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights in 1956. Howl and Other Poems jump- started Ginsberg’s career, receiving both critical acclaim and copious media attention due to the obscenity trial resulting from its publication. Considered one of the principal works of the Beat generation, “Howl” is widely taught in literature classes today and is frequently imitated by and cited as an influence to poets all over the world.

When asked in 1982 how he had mentally and creatively equipped himself to write “Howl,” Ginsberg responded:

You have to be inspired to write something like that. . . . You have to have the right historical information, the right physical combination, the right mental formation, the right courage, the right sense of prophecy, and the right information.

The inspiration for Ginsberg to begin “Howl” was from his friend Carl Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated. Solomon and Ginsberg met in 1949 at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute, where Ginsberg was hospitalized in lieu of serving jail time for his involvement in a property theft ring. Solomon, whom Ginsberg immediately recognized as a genius, had spent time in mental institutions before and would continue to do so until the end of his life. One such instance would inspire “Howl”: After Ginsberg heard that Solomon had been committed at the Pilgrim State Hospital, which happened to be the same facility treating Ginsberg’s mother, he became fully convinced that the greatest thinkers he knew had been “destroyed by madness.”

The structure of “Howl,” which Richard Eberhart called “Biblical in its repetitive grammatical build-up,” is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s long lines, which themselves were derived from the King James Bible. The first and third sections of the poem also employ Whitman’s characteristic listing, with a base word or phrase to unite the lines as a section. In one last nod to Whitman, Ginsberg writes from an intimately personally perspective, opening with first-person singular pronouns (“I saw the best minds of my generation”), not unlike Whitman’s opening of “Song of Myself” (“I celebrate myself, and sing myself”).

Unlike Whitman, though, Ginsberg uses these pronouns only once. Although he does not refer to himself in the first person for the rest of the first section, he is still present in each line. Ginsberg does not write as an outsider looking in; he is intimately engaged in the lives and events of the poem. In the first section of “Howl,” Ginsberg compiles a list of all the minds and spirits that have been ravaged by a mysterious force of “madness,” most of them from his personal experience. His litany refers to acquaintances from all parts of his life, from Carl Solomon to his close friend and fellow Beat figure Neal Cassady, even including himself.

While the catalog in the first section refers only to people connected to Ginsberg, the amassing of such a sizable group makes the “angelheaded hipsters” seem to be an entire generation, a cohort of young people searching for connection in a world that rejects them. This sense of alienation characterized the Beat generation, a group of writers and friends who wrote confessional, experimental poetry and prose, often on the happenings of their counterculture lifestyles. However, Ginsberg does not exclusively refer to the Beats; indeed, he pokes fun at them in “Howl,” calling them scribblers of “lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.” Ginsberg’s howl goes out to all disenchanted Eisenhower era Americans, and the revelation of the intimate details of his life opens up the possibility for readers to recognize similar qualities in themselves and to accept their own nontraditional thoughts and feelings.

Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s technique of spontaneous composition, Ginsberg wrote the first section of “Howl” in one sitting, typing his thoughts straight into a typewriter. Just after completing the first section, he began composing the third. It was not until later that he composed the second section, which forms the bridge between the two and locates the source of the “madness.” Unlike for the first and third sections, which required only minor revisions, Ginsberg wrote more than 20 drafts of the second section. This section identifies the source of society’s disdain for the characters in section 1 as Moloch, the Canaanite fire god to whom parents would sacrifice their children.

Ginsberg’s drug use proved helpful in the composition of the Moloch section of “Howl,” as the central image derives from a vision that he experienced while under the influence of peyote, a psychedelic drug. While walking through the streets of San Francisco, Ginsberg encountered the looming facade of the Francis Drake Hotel and saw in it a terrifying monster: the face of Moloch. Furthermore, an urban landmark seemed appropriate for the villain of “Howl,” in which Ginsberg hoped to address the horrors of civilization. Indeed, as he describes Moloch he begins to sound more like a cityscape than a god. Although based on a hallucination, Ginsberg’s impetus for using Moloch is startlingly clear: After watching so many fellow young people go off to war and die, or lose themselves to the drugs and soullessness of American cities, it truly did seem that children were being fed into a fire.

The third and final section of “Howl” addresses one of these children directly. With each line, Ginsberg comforts his friend Carl Solomon, telling him that he is with him in Rockland (another New York psychiatric hospital where Solomon had spent time). Following each statement of solidarity, Ginsberg provides a snapshot of Solomon’s institutionalized life, documenting his feeble but ingenious attempts to stay alive in the world described in the first and second sections. In the last lines of the poem, Ginsberg places Solomon and himself together for his vision of redemption: “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.” Despite the devastating landscape around him, Ginsberg still envisions a time when bombs will not kill people, hospitals will not need to incarcerate geniuses, and people will not build make-believe divisions between them.

Of the few revisions made on the third section, one of the most important was the change from I am to I’m. This gave each line the appropriate cadence to be read aloud. Its breath-length lines allow for “the right physical combination,” one of Ginsberg’s self-defined requirements for poetic form. Overall, Ginsberg’s concern with sound and rhythm in “Howl” accounts a great deal for its success. Kerouac’s spontaneous style of composition heavily influenced Ginsberg’s writing of this piece, as did the influence of William Carlos Williams, American vernacular, and, in particular, elements of jazz. Ginsberg described the verses of “Howl” as “long saxophone-like chorus lines I knew Kerouac would hear the sound of.” Michael Schumacher points out in his biography of Ginsberg that sections of “Howl” almost take on the feel of musical movements, particularly the second section, which he divides in three:

the first part with its hot saxophonic expressions, reminiscent of the jazz lines of Charlie Parker and Lester Young; the second part, with short “squawks” or statements, not unlike those played by Miles Davis; and the third part, with a cool bluesy and lyrical feeling similar to the moody music played by John Coltrane. (Dharma Lion, 1992)

The connections between “Howl” and jazz music from around the same period help establish the poem as the anthem of a generation.

Notable, too, is the role of “Howl” in the solidification of the Beat generation. Although Jack Kerouac coined the term for their group of friends as early as 1948, and John Clellon Holmes defined and popularized it in a 1952 New York Times article, the movement still lacked the publicity it needed for more writers to be published. While William S. Burroughs’s novel Junkie had been published under a pen name in 1953, authors like Jack Kerouac, who completed his novel On the Road six years before it was published in 1957, were having trouble gaining a foothold in the literary world. In October 1955, with the help of the San Francisco Renaissance poets Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, Ginsberg organized a poetry reading at San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery, where he read “Howl” in public for the first time.

His performance was so moving that it brought him and several audience members to tears. His reading, later hailed as “the birth trauma of the Beat Generation,” led Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish Howl and Other Poems as part of his Pocket Poets Series. One year later, the New York Times sent the reviewer Richard Eberhart to the Bay Area to write a story about the work of the writers there, in which he named “Howl” “the most remarkable poem of the young group.” Ginsberg’s notoriety only increased in 1957, when Ferlinghetti was tried in San Francisco for “publishing and selling obscene material.” By the end of the trial, Howl and Other Poems was in its fourth printing, and the United States was totally aware of the poem itself and the group of writers defending it, but especially of Allen Ginsberg.

For Discussion or Writing
1. While “Howl” is dedicated to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg admits that the poem was an early attempt to deal with the loss of his mother to mental illness. Where is this evident?

2. Compare and contrast “Howl” with T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Waste Land.” Eliot’s poem was composed in the wake of World War I, and Ginsberg’s just after World War II. Is this difference significant? Discuss the conclusions that each poet draws and what those conclusions say about their individual worldviews.

3. The penultimate line of section 1 of “Howl” contains the Aramaic phrase eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani, meaning “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These are the attributed last words of Jesus Christ as he died on the cross. Why does Ginsberg choose to incorporate this line, and what is the significance of its placement at the end of the first section?