Ginsberg - A Study of the First Section of Howl
A Brief Look at the Beat Writer's Poem of Apocalypse
Mar 8, 2009
The style in which Howl is written is a major change from Ginsberg’s earlier poetry, and also different to any expectations in how a poem could be written. He wanted to use a style that had more room for expression than verses of short lines. Simpson writes in Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell (Macmillan, 1979, isbn:0333273966) that the poem was “an experiment in what could be done with the long line”.
Apocalyptic Vision
The poem is a demonic vision combined with a beatific one, leading to spiritual affirmation. Part I begins "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked". It tells of the horror of this apocalyptic and demonic vision. It shows a prophecy by beginning with "I saw".
The poem is anaphoral, with repetition of a beginning word, in this case mainly using "who" at the start of each phrase. This repetition adds strength to the poem. Imagery is crammed into each line giving the poem a richness of description. Extended noun phrases such as "winter midnight streetlight small town rain" are used. Here nouns are used as adjectives; pre-modifiers to describe the rain.
Ginsberg uses paradoxical descriptions, such as "angelheaded hipsters", which shows two different spheres of experience; the sacred and the profane. These people are "burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". This "ancient heavenly connection" represents the past; history and ancient religions. The machinery brings to mind industrial America. It combines the spirituality of the past with the brutality of machinery in modern times.
The Misery of the Forsaken
The poem shows the sadness of living, as Kerouac said in a television interview with Mike Wallace, "it’s a great burden to be alive". There are those who "cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully" and then just "grow old and cried", or those who "created great suicidal dramas", or who "broke down crying". Ginsberg shows the unhappiness of being in a society that does not allow people to be individual, a world which instead classifies them as insane.
Ginsberg shows the importance of protesting for what you believe in when he writes of those who burnt their arms "protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism", or "distributed Supercommunist pamphlets". His own political activism is echoed here by the individual reacting against the system.
An interesting image is those who "rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz". The idea of reincarnation evokes Hinduism, with jazz as the medium for this reincarnation. The line goes on to say "eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani", which were Jesus’ last words on the cross. It means "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" This questioning is present throughout the whole of the poem, showing the misery of the forsaken.
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