Allen Ginsberg's Howl: Genius or Incoherence

By Dwaipayan Banerjee, Undergraduate Student

An argument for the case of 'Howl' as Protest Poetry.

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

John Hollander: Review of Howl and Other poems in the Partisian Review 1957, wrote: Beat poetry proclaims "in a hopped-up way and improvised tune, that nothing seems to be worth saying save in a hopped-up and improvised tone”. Allen Ginsberg has been one of the most controversial poets of this century. He usually attracts criticism in the superlative... either ridiculed as a 'frantic and talentless avant-garde' or recognised as responsible for articulating and catalysing the peripheral voices of the 1950's. In this paper, taking the side of the latter argument; I will read and study his cult-poem 'Howl', and argue that the same deserves its recognition as Protest Poetry, and cannot be dismissed as simply self-pitying incoherent ramblings.
In many ways, poetry is critical to any nation's development as contributing in a discourse of self-definition and protest. America has always viewed itself as an evolving country, forever engaged in pioneering and exploring frontiers. After exhausting it physically in their move westwards during settlement, poets and artists began to explore new 'interior' frontiers, giving voice to a new landscape of introspection. Also, not encumbered by the historical baggage of their European contemporaries, the poets of America were free to percieve the individual in the context of a democratic society. Since the perception of man and self in a democratic world is often in isolation, this perception was often voiced in a very personal poetic language.
By the turn of the 19th century, Darwin's biological determinism, Marx's social and historical determinism and the 'psychic determinism' of Freud had issued challenges to the assumptions of individual choice. In another fifty years America had witnessed two devastating world wars. Also, many believed modernity was gradually and almost imperceptibly moving towards a mechanisation and dehumanisation of society. The Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky wrote “as perception becomes blurred by habit, it becomes automatic and we see the object as though it were hidden in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette.” In other words, gradually the Machinery of habit devours everything: “objects, clothes, furnitre, one's wife, and the fear of war”. The American poet would have to and did emerge as the ideal agent of defamiliarisation, renewing and re-examining a benumbed perspective on the world. In a decade given to uncertainty and witness to an overpowering control of a strong establishment, the avant-garde movement slowly began to take shape. Their protest would not be against very immediate tangible issues, but forms of society which validated and encouraged violence, conformity and the habitualisation of experience, simultaneously marginalising people rebelling against mainstream culture.
Ginsberg was born of Communist and socialist parents, portending a politically leftist upbringing. His mother Naomi was a strong influence in his life. However, Naomi was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and Allen's early childhood was traumatised by having to understand and take care of a delusional and suicidal mother. For most of his life Allen lived the life of a wild Bohemian, engaging in an unrepressed rebellion against the mainstream modes of living. Torrid love affairs in succession with Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs usually led to complications which left Allen distraught. His intense loneliness and need for love, compounded with a wildly confusing life left Allen in doldrums, until he experienced his famous Blake vision. Reading Blake's 'Sunflower', Allen suddenly believes that he has broken through from ordinary consciousness and had actually heard William Blake reading to him, and that he now understood all of the universe in a mere flower as Blake had done centuries before him. After the vision faded, Allen spent the next 15 years experimenting with drugs from Hashish in India to Ayahuasca in South America, trying to recreate the experience, an obsession he cultivated to enhance his poetry and sensory perceptions. Other definitive pre-Howl moments in his life were: a Period of incarceration in a psychiatric institute, a year in Mexico where he lived with the natives for a year playing their drums and drinking Ayahuasca, the potent central American hallucinogen and a fortuitous meeting with Peter Orlovsky, a young Russian model whom he lived with in a avowed state of marriage till Allen's death 40 years later.
In 1953, beginning to emerge from the maddening confusion around him Allen wrote 'Howl' and later read it out at the famous Six Gallery reading at San Francisco. As Michael Schumacher's describes it in his biography of Ginsberg, Allen had been drinking wine throughout the evening and was intoxicated by the time the lights dimmed. Somewhat nervous, he started in a calm, quiet tone, letting the poem’s words achieve their own impact, but before long he gained confidence and began to sway rhythmically with the music of his poetry, responding to the enthusiasm of the audience, which was transfixed by "Howl’s" powerful imagery. The crowd joined Keroauc in punctuating Allen’s lines with shouts of encouragement. By the time he had concluded, he was in tears. The audience erupted in appreciation of the work, as if each person in attendance recognised that literary history had been made. After this, Ginsberg enjoyed fame and notoriety in equal measure, and travelled extensively over the world, reading Howl at thousands of universities in scores of countries worldwide, including India. Later, he almost willed the Beat movement to existence, personally ensuring the publication of several of his literary friends, including Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. He himself remained central to Beat culture for the decades to come, defining the language and values which were later espoused and hijacked by the 60's counter-culture of America. He made a tremendous impact on popular music, including Bob Dylan with whom he recorded and co-wrote several songs, and Tom Waits with whom he sang, and also the like of Joan Baez, Patti Smith and several others.
To put it in a sentence, beat poetry was the renaissance of individual sensibility carried through the vehicle of individualised metrics, with it roots in the 1950's, and as some critics say, catalysed into existence by the reading of the poem Howl. Its principle characters in the San Fransisco chapter were Burroughs, Cassady, Ginsberg, Keroauc, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and several others of their friends. Wether this premise holds true or not is difficult to say, but it certainly brought together most writers recognised now as the founding leaders of the Beat Movement, and articulated their collective concern as never before. It brought together a generation who espoused the stance of the alienated, the dispossessed and even those considered insane. Rejecting the lives of the stereotyped TV-addicted respectably-employed middle-class American, they would now look at mainstream society from the periphery, and subverting its disciplines and codes.
I shall only read certain extracts, since Ginsberg, and this is true again for most beat writers, wrote of intensely personal experiences and memories, which are incomprehensible to those not intimately associated with the biographical details of his life.

Howl
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, ...
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no
broken hearts,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos
wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, ...
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their
heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess- fully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where
they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up
clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of
sinis- ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap- pened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the
ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, ...
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find
out Eternity, ...
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the
soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together...
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intel- ligent and shaking
with shame, rejected yet con- fessing out the soul to conform to the Rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, ...
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of
America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to
the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable 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 whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun- ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!...
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless
Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac- tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the
cities! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!...
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! ...
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral
nations! invincible mad houses! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave- ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which
exists and is everywhere about us!...
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange...
I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses ...
I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void ...
I'm with you in Rockland where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com- rades all together singing the final stanzas
of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs
all night and won't let us sleep
As Michael McClure described it, Howl was the trigger. Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things he'd ever seen. At that time, he says, people had crew cuts, and they looked at beat writers like they were were misplaced cannon fodder. In all their memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. After Howl, none of them wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. They wanted to make it new and wanted to invent it and the process of it as they went into it. They wanted voice and they wanted vision.
McClure, a prominent poet of the beat generation, collaborator with the Doors and writer of Joplin's Mercedes Benz, couldn't have summed up Ginsberg's influence better. Poetry had become a tangible reality, breeding a rebellion for a renaissance of the individual sensibility and for the acceptance of alternatives modes of perception
Structurally, Howl is free verse, borrowing William Carlos Williams’s triad form, but most importantly conforming only to the rules of speech-rhythm and breath-lines. Williams was Ginsberg's primary poetic influence, urging him to give up his early formal style in favour of spontaneity and natural speech-rhythms of 'Howl'. Imitating the language of street-talk, of peripheral America, it abandoned formal metrical patterns in favour of breaking a line for breath. Each line is intoned in a single breath, in what Ginsberg believes to be closer to the internal consciousness of the reader as opposed to metrical patterns enforced externally and unnaturally by academic establishments they were protesting against. Perhaps the best way to describe the rhythm and metrical arrangement of 'Howl' is as Kerouac once did, comparing it to playing a saxophone in 12-bar jazz. What he meant was that every line of poetry is like a blow of saxophone, the poet/instrumentalist makes a point in one blow of breath, pauses and continues his thought while changing the thought/tone line. Protesting against the establishment, he sought to posit himself against the establishment’s adherence to formal verse. Also, his choice of freestyle verse assumes and requires a certain spontaneity in composition. In turn, spontaneity in composition carries with it the implication of his poetic composition being more directly a reflection of his personal thought, thoughts not seen through the prisms of externally imposed metres and stylistic techniques, the same principles the surrealists had understood and adhered to at a earlier time. Howl articulates this in:
“to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intel- ligent and shaking
with shame, rejected yet con- fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, ...”
The spontainiety of composition and the form of the verse allows the poet to conform to the rhythm of thought, recreating the syntax and measure of poor human prose.

The spontaneity in form is reflective of the honesty in content. For Ginsberg, and this is true of most beat poetry, there is no distance between the poet and the poem. The poem is almost always an honest and direct expression of the poet's defiant preoccupation with his self. Howl is such a poem, as one critic put it, "sustained shrieks of frantic defiance" and "smoking attacks on civilisation which hurls everything, personal and sexual memories, folk idiom. It encompasses the fury of the soul-injured lover or child, and its dynamic lies in the way it spews up undigested the elementary though, need for freedom of sympathy so long repressed by the smooth machinery of intellectual distortion". As described by Ginsberg, Part 1 is a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamblike youths. It avows his identification with a certain section of the peripheral minority of America, a section of creatively rampant youth marginalised by a monstrous mechanised society. The 'best minds of his generation' wander around unaccepted, given no recognition, no voice, not even one free beer. They believe in their connection with a 'heavenly dynamo', and nothing could better describe the politics of the Beats. In the same way, nothing describes the sad Irony of being misunderstood better than "who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade." He also howls for those who were forced to open antique stores and burned alive in innocent flannel suits, the warriors fallen by the roadside, so to speak. To understand his poetry, one must not look for interpretation in every line, but absorb the psychological and aural effect of the words in toto. The rapidity with which he spews out imagery and sound requires a throwing in of words in the metaphorical stew, out which we must digest the impressions they create, not the meanings they hold. "who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis- ter intelligent editors" illustrates what I mean. In a flurry of words, Ginsberg forms several hazy images at the same time, not concentrating on detailing a single one. He “trapped the archangel of the
soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together...” The pervading imagery in the first part is one of loneliness, bohemian wandering and suffering. It pursues a Blakean "path of excess to the Palace of Wisdom", Rimbaudian "derangement of the senses", to arrive at scattered and brief glimpses and visions, but terminating in either conformity (flannel suits) or despair (jumping from bridges). It registers a frustation at the societal monopoly on reality and its refusal to recognise the validity of the visionary, perhaps drug-induced experience. The suffering becomes an all-consuming experience, until articulation and expression have to butchered out. The product of t his suffering is Howl, a testament to a pain which will endure for a 'thousand years'.

The second part names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb. He is the biblical Moloch, Old God of the Bible, worshipped by Jews, the god of sacrifice and war, the god to whom parents sacrificed their children. Moloch was depicted as a giant stone statue with flames all around him. It was the practise of religious women to worship Moloch by casting their children in the arms of the statue and watching them burn alive. Ginsberg switches from the over-arching survey in Part I to first person confession and defiance. He rips through formal logic in presentation, to the bare communication available in words direct from the soul, as adjective becomes noun, and noun becomes adjective which is noun (Bowering).
Blake regarded 'Molech' as the presiding spirit of the second of the seven periods of the great fall, in Blake's Milton:
"Loud his furnaces rage among the Wheels if Og, &
pealing loud the cries of the victims of fire;
and pale his Priestesses infolded in Veils of Pestilence,
border'd
With War..."
Howl’s Moloch is represented in governments, armies, money, machinery, skyscrapers, factories and banks. In short, he represents institutions and economics as the chief evils afflicting the human experience, antithetical to his 'natural ecstasy'.
In Part III, he must return from this transcendence of experience and climactic first-person identification of evil to a narrative reconciliation with his victim-figure. As with Moloch, he now identifies a single victim figure in Carl Solomon, his companion in the psychiatric institute he was incarcerated in. Leaving a discussion of the madness motif for later, Part III is A litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its Glory. It reaffirms and develops the sympathetic, affectionate identification of Ginsberg with the man who for him epitomises the rebellious visionary victim. He is with Carl Solomon in Rockland, the mental institute in which they both spent time, and he uses this phrase to create a rhythm, as he used 'who' in the first Part. At first the imagery of the man is that of a lonely one, but as it builds up, it becomes that of twenty-five thousand men, and the true ailing figure is recognised as not only that of the marginalised individual, but also concomitantly, the figure of coughing United States, a country unable to reconcile itself to its own, and coughs all night, awakening a sympathetic Allen and not letting him sleep.
In Howl, one may argue that there is no rational discourse as in other literatures of dissidence, leaving Ginsberg open to the charge of being politically uncommitted. The same people will argue that Howl is not a poem of protest at all, but merely a demonstration of personal anguish. This would even hold true if one conceived of protest in terms of conventional politics. To Ginsberg however, and for several of the beat writers, conventional political revolution was only "a temporary break-down followed by the reinstitution of repression, a cycle of explosion and repression, activity and passivity, in eternal recurrence." Their commitment was to 'metapolitics' - in which spiritual freedom is the only true warrant for political freedom. Ginsberg described his poetry as Angelical Ravings, which isn’t to do with political vagaries about who should shoot who. Several other artists of the same period have articulated their politics in the same way. Stanley Kubrick says that he tries to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content. Although Ginsberg immersed himself fully in the protest movements against Vietnam in the 1960's, and with the Gay Rights Activism and Anti-Bomb protests in the decades to come, his articulation was never programmatically political. Consisted largely of mantra chanting, his articulation was in the language of the intensely individual, encouched in terminology such as free love, an international brotherhood, and a desire to transcend the human consciousness, terms we associate with the 60's hippie culture. Spiritual freedom was the primary goal, political freedom would follow as a necessary corollary. They were often criticised by even the liberals, for it seemed that although the rebelled against the mainstream establishment, they seldom committed to a programmatic protest of the leftists.
In this way one may see Howl as an artistic bomb, critiquing and weakening the system, Moloch. However, can Ginsberg rehabilitate us, having dropped the bomb, where were we to look for this spirtiual freedom? His answers in the 60's turned to Indian mysticism, setting and following the middle-class American trend of treating an Indian guru like a new exotic flavour at a restaurant. It can be argued that his Indian religious experience was cheaply acquired, bought at the cost of a plane ride and a few months in Varanasi, in the form of a couple of religious mantras. I may be wrong, and India might have had a greater impact than I believe, but it seems difficult that he could have come to any significant understanding of the Indian traditions of thought in the space of a few weeks spent on the riverbanks. During a visit to Cuba, he was utterly insensitive to the crises and obstacles the country faced, turning a blind eye to the issues the state tried to bring to his attention. Instead, he believed spurious street rumours about the prejudiced view of homosexuality, and spent the rest of his visit reviling the Castro regime based on this information. Later, he turned to Zen Buddhism, following Jack Keroauc's long-standing interest in the same. However, in the context of the 50's and 60's, his own answer to the fervent pleas articulated in Howl was the chanting of mantras, pleading for the legalisation of drugs, pleading for the acceptance of homosexuality, and espousing the cause of free love and world peace.
In Howl too, he is not engaged in finding conventional solutions to conventional political problems. As a form of protest poetry, it registers a protest against the Moloch figure, a figure symbolising an establishment which stood for everything Ginsberg rejected - violence, conventional morality, principles of conformity and the mechanisation of the human experience. Therefore we may see Howl as a protest poem, but one concerned with the metapolitical, with spirtual rather than political salvation.
A favourite motif of the poem is madness and hysteria, states of consciousness with which Ginsberg was intimately associated, from Naomi's madness to his own incarceration to a mental institute. Naomi's insanity was something which Ginsberg struggled to come to terms with for several years. He succeeded in articulating this struggle several years after writing 'Howl' in Kaddish, his Jewish funeral-song which was denied to her in life. Ginsberg, in my opinion, saw insanity not as a clinical state, but as a state of being unacceptable to society. Naomi's usually sharp intelligence even during her worst periods, confused him and pushed him to understand her state more fully. Also, his vision of William Blake convinced him of the arbitrariness of the lines separating the sane and the insane, the real and the imaginary. As a result, he began to explore other forms of consciousness, other forms unacceptable to mainstream society. Drug-induced derangement was one such form, and soon he began writing most of his poetry under the influence of hallucinogens. In his own experience in a mental institution, he made the acquaintance of Carl Solomon. Carl Solomon was an avowed follower of Artaud and Dada, studying at Harvard and at Greenwich and later demanding self-lobotomy for which he was confined to the institute. The two had stuck off a rapport based on their love for Dostoyevsky, and later Ginsberg had written Howl entitled a Howl for Carl Solomon. In other words, the title intended the poem to Howl for unacceptable states of consciousness including that of the drugged, that of the super-creative, that of the misfit and that of the insane. This was to be only a stepping-stone for his further understanding varied states of consciousness. He came to terms with his mother's insanity after writing Kaddish as a self-purgatorial poem; and with the Blake experience which he substituted with his interest in Buddhism and Oriental mysticism. I therefore see Howl, as a meta-political protest for alternative modes of perception, be it drug-induced or clinically insane, or simply modes of perception and expression breaking away from formal, established traditions.
My case, therefore, for the recognition of 'Howl' as Protest Poetry, versus the way in which it is traditionally percieved as self-involved self-pitying spiel was thus in two parts:
The first part of my argument, as I tried to put forward, was the idea that 'Howl' is concerned with protest, but protest not in rational discourse, but in the form of Beat metapolitics where spiritual salvation is more important than political revolution. In the second part of my argument, I tried to sketch Ginsberg's preoccupation with alternative modes of perception, and also illustrate how the poem 'Howl(s)' for a recognition of these modes of perception; registering protest against societal monopoly of that which is considered normal and sane.