Howl in Context: An Historical Analysis

To understand the works of Allen Ginsberg it is first necessary to understand the

historical context out of which they flowered. By the time Howl was published in 1956, the
American dream of economic prosperity was in full gear. Television was becoming a dominant
form of mass media, consumer values had reached an almost religious fervor, and anticommunist rhetoric compelled public discourse toward conformity. But\ while white Americans
now enjoyed a newfound sense of social cohesion under the banner of mass production and
consumption, sprawling outwards into newly developed suburbia, the untouchable caste of
addicts, thieves and vagrants left behind in the inner cities eked out their own survival and
abided the failures of a capitalist revival. It was in the streets, bars and brothels that the selfdescribed Beat generation found their kicks, and it was through their exploration of the darkness
that they sought their inner light. Ginsbergs Howl made an indelible imprint on the psyches
of the discarded and dispossessed, but more than that it helped to catalyze a movement of
growing social consciousness. His work, structured as it is in three parts with an appended
footnote, performs specific functions with regard to describing and finding meaning within the
historical context in which it was written. By giving voice to the voiceless, revealing an
apocalyptic vision of the status quo, and singing praise of spiritual awakening, he helped pave
the way for the countercultural revolution that was to follow in the decades to come.
Howl opens with the now iconic lament, 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 (line 1-2). Immediately, he sets the stage for what follows as a
litany of sorts of the human depravity found in the alleys, subways and hotel rooms of derelict

cityscapes scattered across America. With detailed strokes, he paints a portrait of drug addiction,
homosexuality and petty crime, the purveyors of which he depicts with real affection,
sympathetic to their plight as they lounge hungry and lonesome [] seeking jazz or sex or
soup (28). Divested as they were of opportunities for social mobility, and likewise divested of
any avenue to air their grievances, Ginsberg made their voices his own. Their plight was his,
too, of course: as a self-professed homosexual and drug user, Ginsberg dragged himself through
the same streets and onto the pages of Howl, not as a spectator, but as a participant. Contrast
these deviant lifestyles with the prevailing postwar imperatives, and the profundity of the Beat
ethic becomes clearer. Oliver Harris writes that
the early Cold War years were marked by an unprecedented politicization of culture and
by the conscription of private life in the name of national security. The key to political
containment abroad [] was as much a matter of patriotic self-policing and voluntary
self-censorship as of panoptic state surveillance. (p. 172)
Deviance was effectively shamed and terrorized into the shadows, never wholly eradicated, but
never fully acknowledged or understood by the gatekeepers of acceptable behavior, either. The
social pressures to conform, then, exerted by this cultural hegemony, must have been enormous,
whilst the courage to deviate equally so. Thus, as Harris concludes, open communication stood,
for Ginsberg, as the ultimate indictment of Cold War culture (174).
Part II of Howl begins this open indictment in which the demonic figure Moloch is
invoked repeatedly and, with palpable dread and outrage, castigated for its many crimes against
humanity. Symbolizing for Ginsberg the dehumanizing and systematically oppressive
machinations of capitalism, Moloch is described in terms of cement and aluminum, factories and

skyscrapers, the architecture of an urban nightmare. The harsh economic realities for Ginsbergs
cohorts are revealed here: Moloch, whose blood is running money (83) and whose soul is
electricity and banks (85), profits from the fealty of its subjects, whereas the people are resigned
to ashcans and unobtainable dollars (80). Economic policies of the postwar era can go some
distance in explaining the disparity. According to sociologist Rachel E. Dwyer, Federal housing
policy in the US across the postwar period supported the construction of new houses more than
public provision or renovation of older structures (page 1). This had the perhaps unintended
consequence of massive migrations of middle class whites flocking to the suburbs, while the
cities were left in disrepair and largely inherited by ethnic minorities and other lower class
demographics.
Beyond the physical manifestation of industrial and commercial development, Moloch
also represents the interior experience of the mentally subservient: Moloch the
incomprehensible prison whose name is the Mind! (82,85). It is with this prison of the mind,
or more accurately, with the transcendence of such, that the poem seems to primarily concern
itself. Not just a general indictment of the status quo of postwar American values, Ginsbergs
poem also explores the yearning for spiritual awakening. Everything is holy! everybodys holy!
everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everymans an angel! chants Ginsberg in the
poems footnote (line 3). He searches and finds divinity in the sacred and the profane. Inspired
as such by the Western mysticism of William Blake and the Transcendentalist movement a
century before him, Ginsberg looked to the mundanity of natural, everyday experience for his
spiritual ecstasy, a practice also shared with Eastern spiritual traditions that were being
popularized at the time. Zen Buddhism, in particular, began to have a massive impact on
American intellectuals and academics, as well as Beat icons like Jack Kerouac and Allen

Ginsberg himself. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Japanese native D. T. Suzuki, as well as
Western scholars such as Alan Watts, Buddhist thought was imported and reconfigured to speak
to modern sensibilities in the West. Professor of religious studies Masao Abe explains:
So it was, in the midst of the waves of sudden change in world history, with the order of
Western society so shaken to its roots by the war, that the luminous body of Zen []
began to emit its own original light. In those days, when many people in Europe and
America were seized with anxiety, doubt, and despair over the failure of their traditional
system of values, Zen emerged to suddenly impress a large segment of the intellectual
community, and began to provide new hope for people's broken spirit. (par. 4)
Following Suzukis lead, Americans would further synthesize the precepts of Zen with their
aforementioned modern sensibilities, and the Beats were no exception. Sometimes criticized for
diverging too sharply from the essential teachings of Zen, or worse, merely cherry-picking
aspects of it to justify their own anarchic pursuits, the Beat writers Ginsberg included at the
very least took their idea of Zen to heart and ran with it, inspiring a generation as they did.
The decades that were to follow saw incredible social turmoil as Civil Rights, Womens
Liberation, and anti-war movements gained critical mass. Drug use and sexual liberation, too,
were out of the bag, so to speak. Thanks in no small part to Ginsbergs Howl, The Beat
movements drop-out lifestyle and nebulous philosophy would evolve into a full-on
countercultural revolution with real political and social ramifications for America and indeed, the
world as a whole.

Works Cited
Abe, Masao. "The Influence of D. T. Suzuki in the West." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism.
Ed. Linda Pavlovski and Scott T. Darga. Vol. 109. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Literature
Resource Center. Web.
Dwyer, Rachel E. "Cohort Succession in the US Housing Market: New Houses, the Baby Boom,
and Income Stratification." Population Research and Policy Review 27.2 (2008): 161.
Business Economics and Theory Collection. Web.
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2. Ed Nina
Baym and Robert S Levine. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2013. 1356-64. Print.
Harris, Oliver. Harris, "Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, And The
Political Economy Of Beat Letters." Twentieth Century Literature 46.2 (2000): 171-192.
Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web.