Ginsberg's Howl
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Alan Ginsberg wrote poetry in free verse and he was an instrumental member in a revolutionary movement in American society, the Beat Movement. In his work, Ginsberg was often one of America’s harshest critics, particularly when it came to the entrenched absolute values of the middle-class status-quo. In much of his work, Ginsberg attempts to posit an individualistic view versus a communal one. Ginsberg often emerges as anti-American and a critic of American society in his work. Ginsberg was one of the most influential members of the Beat generation, basically a rebellious movement that laid the foundation for the anti-establishment Hippie culture of the 1960s. The Beat writers were generally composed of intelligent young adults who refused to accept the entrenched social norms of their era. Mainly children of the depression and World War II adolescents, these writers totally rejected middle-class society in every aspect. Ginsberg’s Howl is a poem that is a combination of the free style verse of Walt Whitman and the rantings of an Old Testament minister, as it harshly attacks America for being a vast wasteland in a stream-of-consciousness style more than likely emboldened by drug and alcohol use. The structure of the poem is rambling and punctuation is sparse as Ginsberg attempts to describe the bizarre, lonely individuals who exist in the margins of society (i.e., poets, unpublished novelists, radicals, junkies, etc.). Ginsber
. . .
ans are still sacrificed:
Moloch who 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! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasures! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
(Ginsberg 68)
The Footnote to Howl returns to Moloch, but Ginsberg does not use the word Moloch. Instead, he chooses to replace the word Moloch with the word holy. In so doing, Ginsberg was using complete sarcasm and satire because he is saying the very things that were considered of Moloch are holy. Ginsberg views America as a status-quo capitalist rut wherein anyone considered opposed to the entrenched, absolute middle-class values was pushed by the wayside and considered evil or sinful. We see in his Footnote to Howl that he is attempting to show that all things and all types of people are holy nor sinful. In doing so, he leaves few out who are typically ostracized by the entrenched status-quo:
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 1614
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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