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as Ginsberg attempts to describe the bizarre, lonely individuals who exist in the margins of society (i.e., poets, unpublished novelists, radicals, junkies, etc.). Ginsberg felt the meter was what he once described as neural-firings. Middle-class society, from the Beat’s perspective, represented perverse values and institutions which swept all such marginal individuals as poets, artists, junkies and others into jail, the madhouse or the grave.
In fact, Ginsberg wrote the poem inspired by his friend Carl Solomon who was committed to a mental hospital, “…who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granit...