"Howl" By James E.B. Breslin Essay, Research Paper
Reprinted from the book, FROM MODERN TO CONTEMPORARY: AMERICAN
POETRY 1945-1965 by James E. Breslin published by the University of Chicago
Press, copyright ? 1983, 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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James E. B. Breslin
"Twenty years is more or less a literary generation," Richard Eberhart
remarks, "and Ginsberg’s Howl ushered in a new generation." Many
contemporary poets have testified to the liberating effect that Ginsberg’s poem had on
them in the late fifties, but "ushered in" is too tame a phrase to describe
Ginsberg’s historical impact. Ginsberg, for whom every poem begins, or ought to, with a
frontal assault on established positions, thrust a battering ram against those protective
enclosures, human and literary, so important to the young Wilbur and Rich. A
"howl" is a prolonged animal cry and so an instinctive cry, and Ginsberg’s poem
still forcefully communicates the sense of a sudden, angry eruption of instincts long
thwarted, of the release of excluded human and literary energies. Not irony but prophetic
vision; not a created persona but "naked" confession; not the autotelic poem but
wrathful social protest; not the decorums of high culture but the language and matter of
the urban streets; not disciplined craftmanship but spontaneous utterance and
indiscriminate inclusion–"Howl" violated all the current artistic canons and
provoked a literary, social, and even legal scandal.
Yet the Ginsberg of the late fifties was an oddly contradictory figure. He was a
strident revolutionary who, when not announcing his absolute newness, was busily tracing
his genealogical links with underground traditions and neglected masters, especially Blake
and Whitman. History was bunk, but the new consciousness Ginsberg proclaimed was empowered
by a fairly familiar form of nineteenth-century Idealism, the basis for his admiration for
Blake and Whitman. Ginsberg opened his poetry to sordid urban realities, and he packed
"Howl" with things, with matter. Yet, as we shall see, immersion in what he
calls "the total animal soup of time" was the first step in a painful ordeal
which ended in the visionary’s flight out of time. Ginsberg’s poem reaches,
nervously and ardently, after rest from urban frenzy, a resolution the poet can only find
in a vertical transcendence. Ginsberg’s departure from the end-of-the-line modernism
was a dramatic but hardly a new one; it took the form of a return to those very romantic
models and attitudes that modernism tried to shun.
Ginsberg’s subversion of the prevailing artistic norms was not achieved either quickly
or easily. While poets like Wilbur and Lowell early built poetic styles and earned
impressive critical recognition, Ginsberg’s early career consisted of a series of false
starts. "Howl"–contrary to popular impression–is not the work of an angry young
man; the poem was not written until its author was thirty, and Howl and Other Poems
was Ginsberg’s first published but third written book. Nor was
"Howl"–contrary to a popular impression created by its author–a sudden,
spontaneous overflow of creative energy. The poem, started, dropped, then started again a
few years later, was itself the product of a series of false starts. The visionary
perspective of "Howl" had already been revealed to Ginsberg in a series of
hallucinations he had experienced in the summer of 1948. The false starts were a part of
Ginsberg’s struggle to accept these visions and to find a literary form and language that
would faithfully embody them. The letters, notebooks, and manuscripts in the Allen
Ginsberg Archives at Columbia, along with Ginsberg’s published autobiographical writings
and interviews, allow us to document in ample detail the slow evolution, in the late
forties and early fifties, of one dissenting poet.
[. . . .]
Ginsberg once described Howl and Other Poems as a series of experiments in what
can be done with the long line since Whitman. In "Howl" itself Ginsberg stepped
outside the formalism of the fifties, stepped away from even the modernism of Williams,
and turned back to the then-obscure poet of Leaves of Grass, transforming
Whitman’s bardic celebrations of the visionary yet tender self into a prophetic chant
that is angry, agonized, fearful, funny, mystic, and affectionate—the prolonged and
impassioned cry of Ginsberg’s hidden self which had survived. "Loose
ghosts wailing for body try to invade the bodies of living men": this is how
Ginsberg, from "Howl" onward, perceives the literary past: haunting forms eager,
like Moloch, to devour the present. Searching instead for a language that would incarnate
the self, Ginsberg took the notion of form as discovery he had learned from Williams and
pushed it in confessional and visionary directions alien to the older poet. Form was no
longer self-protective, like "asbestos gloves," but a process of
"compositional self-exploration," the activities of the notebooks turned into
art. The Gates of Wrath had simultaneously produced an apotheosis and an
elimination of the author’s personality; the elevated formality of the language, by its
vagueness, confronts us with a poet who may be a grandiose figure but is also nobody, and
nowhere, in particular. In Empty Mirror, Ginsberg had tried to shed the eternal
self and descend to particulars; but his imitativeness of Williams had produced the same
self-annihilating result. "Howl" links the visionary and the concrete, the
language of mystical illumination and the language of the street, and the two are joined
not in a static synthesis but in a dialectical movement in which an exhausting and
punishing immersion in the most sordid of contemporary realities issues in transcendent
vision. Ginsberg is still uneasy about life in the body, which he more often represents as
causing pain (i.e., "purgatoried their torsos") than pleasure; but in this way
he is, like his mother in "Kaddish," "pained" into Vision. At the
close of "Howl," having looked back over his life, Ginsberg can affirm a core
self of "unconditioned Spirit" and sympathetic humanity that has survived an
agonizing ordeal.
Of the poem’s three parts (plus "Footnote"), the first is the longest and
most powerful, an angry prophetic lament. Its cataloging of real and surreal images in
long dithyrambic lines creates a movement that is rushed, frenzied, yet filled with sudden
gaps and wild illuminations; the poem begins by immersing us in the extremities of modern
urban life, overwhelming and flooding us with sensations. Generalizing generational
experience in Parts I and II, Ginsberg shows these "best minds" veering back and
forth between extremes, with the suddenness and intensity of an electric current leaping
between two poles; they adopt attitudes of defiance, longing, terror, zaniness, hysteria,
prayer, anger, joy, tears, exhaustion–culminating in the absolutes of madness and
suicide. Clothes and then flesh are constantly being stripped away in this ordeal; the
"best minds" are exposed and tormented, then cast out into the cold and
darkness. So they are at once hounded and neglected ("unknown" and
"forgotten" in the poem’s words). But modern civilization’s indifference and
hostility provoke a desperate search for something beyond it for spiritual illumination.
Again and again, the young men are left "beat" and exhausted, alone in their
empty rooms, trapped in time–at which point they gain glimpses of eternity.
"Howl" constantly pushes toward exhaustion, a dead end, only to have these ends
twist into moments of shuddering ecstasy. In one of the poem’s metaphors, boundaries are
set down, push in on and enclose the self–then suddenly disintegrate. At such times
terror shifts to ecstasy; the "madman bum" is discovered to be the angel-headed
hipster, and "beat" (beaten, exhausted) becomes "beatific."
As the catalog of Part I moves through gestures of greater and greater desperation, the
hipsters finally present "themselves on the granite steps house with shaven heads and
harlequin speech of suicide, instantaneous lobotomy"–an act that frantically mixes
defiance and submission, clownishness and martyrdom. What they want is immediate release
from their heads, from suffering; what they get is prolonged incarceration, "the
concrete void of insulin" shots and therapy aimed not at liberation but
"adjustment," their "bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon." At
this point, in its longest and most despairing line, the poem seems about to collapse, to
"end":
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement
window,
and the last door closed at 4am and the last telephone slammed at the
wall in reply and
the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental
furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful
little bit of hallucination–
With all communication broken off and all vision denied, the self is left in a lonely,
silent, empty room–the self is such a room–the room itself the culmination of the
poem’s many images of walls, barriers, and enclosures. In having the visionary quest end
in the asylum, Ginsberg is referring to his own hospitalization, that of Carl Solomon
(whom he had met in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute) and that of his mother. Moreover,
madness is here perceived as encapsulating the psyche in a private world. In a strikingly
similar passage in "Kaddish" Ginsberg emphasizes the way his mother’s illness
removed her into a private, hallucinatory world ("her own universe") where, in
spite of all his hysterical screaming at her, she remained inaccessible ("no road
that goes elsewhere–to my own" world). Ginsberg himself had found it impossible to
communicate his own visions, to make them real to others. At this climactic moment of Part
I, then, the condition of separation, division in time–a preoccupation of Ginsberg’s
poetry since The Gates of Wrath–has been taken all the way out: temporal reality
is experienced as a series of unbridgeable gaps, a void populated with self-enclosed
minds. Ordeal by immersion leaves the self feeling dead and walled-in; the body, heavy as
stone, lacks affect and becomes a heavy burden, while the spirit incarcerated inside the
"dead" body finds itself in no sweet golden clime but a "concrete
void."
Ginsberg’s state of mind at this point can be compared with his prevision mood "of
hopelessness, or dead-end": with "nothing but the world in front of me" and
"not knowing what to do with that." Here, too, at the limits of
despair–with the active will yielded up–Ginsberg experiences a sudden infusion of
energy; the poem’s mood dramatically turns and the concluding lines in Part I affirm
the self’s power to love and to communicate within a living cosmos. Immediately
following the poem’s most despairing lines comes its most affectionate: "ah, Carl,
while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup
of time." Unlike Wilber and Rich, Ginsberg does not seek a cautious self-insularity,
and he here endorses vulnerability to danger and a tender identification with the victims
of time and history. "I saw the best minds of my generation," Ginsberg
had begun, as if a prophetic and retrospective detachment exempted him from the fate he
was describing; but Ginsberg now writes from inside the ordeal, as if the aim of
writing were not to shape or contain, but sympathetically to enter an experience.
By his own unrestrained outpouring of images and feelings Ginsberg exposes himself as
writer to literary ridicule and rejection, and he does risk the annihilation of his poetic
self in the released flood of raw experience and emotion. But by risking these dangers
Ginsberg can achieve the kind of poetry he describes in Part I’s last six lines, a poetry
that bridges the gap between selves by incarnating the author’s experience, making the
reader, too, feel it as a "sensation."
Immediately following the poem’s most intimate line comes its most exalted and
grandiose, as if Ginsberg could rightfully claim a prophetic role only after acknowledging
his vulnerable humanity.
and who therefore ran through icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of
the alchemy of the use of the elipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating
plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul betwen 2 visual images and joined
the
elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together
jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you
speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out
the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless
head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what
might be left to say in time to come after death,
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 sabachthani saxaphone 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.
In biographical terms, the agonized elation of these lines may recall the emotional
lift given Ginsberg when, apparently at the end of his rope when hospitalized, he
discovered in Carl Solomon someone who shared his "vision" of life, someone he could
communicate with. But the mood of these lines more obviously grows out of the writing
that’s preceded them, as the poem turns on itself to consider its own nature, style, and
existence; in fact, these closing lines of Part I drop some helpful hints on how to read
"Howl," as if Ginsberg feared he had gone too far and needed to toss a few
footbridges across the gap separating him from his reader. Later on I want to take
of these hints and talk in detail about the poem’s idea and practice of language; for now
I want to emphasize what Ginsberg is saying here about the very act of writing his poem.
In the 1948 visions the "living Creator" had spoken to Ginsberg as "to his
son"; no secret about Ginsberg’s identity here! Now, having been persecuted for his
visions, Ginsberg echoes the despair of Christ on the cross: "eli eli lamma lamma
Sabacthani." Yet this modern messiah incarnates divine spirit not in his body but in
his writing, which embodies the "sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus." So
the tormented Ginsberg arises "reincarnate" in the apocalyptic words of his
own poem. "Howl," butchered out of his own body, will be "good to eat a
thousand years."
The movement of Part I—a building sense of being closed-in issuing in a release of
visionary energy—becomes the movement between Parts II and III of "Howl."
"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains
and imagination?" Ginsberg asks at the start of Part II; his answer–Moloch!–becomes
the repeated base word for a series of exclamatory phrases ("Moloch the loveless!
Mental Moloch!") in which Ginsberg seeks to exorcise this demonic power by naming it
correctly and exposing its true nature. In Part I Ginsberg immerses himself and his reader
in the tormented intensity and sudden illuminations of the underground world; now in Part
II, strengthened by his descent and return, he can confront his persecutor angrily, his
words striving for magical force as they strike, like a series of hammer blows, against
the iron walls of Moloch. As we have just seen, Moloch is an ancient deity to whom
children were sacrificed, just as the "rains and imagination" of the present
generation are devoured by a jealous and cruel social system. Moloch stands broadly for
authority—familial, social, literary—and Ginsberg does not share the young
Adrienne Rich’s belief in an authority that is "tenderly severe."
Manifest in skyscrapers, prisons, factories, banks, madhouses, armies, governments,
technology, money, bombs, Moloch represented a vast, all-encompassing social reality that
is at best unresponsive (a "concrete void") , at worst a malign presence that
feeds off individuality and difference, Moloch—"whose mind is pure
machinery"—is Ginsberg’s version of Blake’s Urizen, pure reason and
abstract form. A clear contrast to the grave yet tender voice that Ginsberg heard in the
first of his visions, Moloch is also "the heavy judger of men," the parent whose
chilling glance can terrify the child, paralyze him with self-doubt and make him feel
"crazy" and "queer." Moloch, then, is the principle of separation and
conflict in life, an external force so powerful that it eats its way inside and divides
the self against itself. "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!" It
is Moloch who is the origin of all the poem’s images of stony coldness (the granite steps
of the madhouse, the body turned to stone, the sphinx of cement and aluminum,
the vast stone of war, the rocks of time, etc.). Like the Medusa of
classical myth, Moloch petrifies. Ginsberg’s driving, heated repetition of the name,
moreover, creates the feeling that Moloch is everywhere, surrounding, enclosing–a cement
or iron structure inside of which the spirit, devoured, sits imprisoned and languishing;
and so Moloch is also the source of all the poem’s images of enclosure (head, room,
asylum, jail).
"Moloch whom I abandon!" Ginsberg cries out at one point. Yet in spite of all
the imprecations and even humor directed against this ubiquitous presence, the release of
pent-up rage is finally not liberating; anger is not the way out. Part II begins with
bristling defiance, but it ends with loss, futility, and self-contempt ass Ginsberg sees
all he values, "visions! Omens! Hallucinations! Miracles!
Ecstasies!"—"the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit"—"gone
down the American river!" And so the mood at the close of Part II, similar to the
moment in Part I when the hipsters with shaven heads and harlequin speech, present
themselves for lobotomy, the mood here is hysterically suicidal, with anger, laughter, and
helplessness combining in a giddy self-destructiveness:
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!
They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying
flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
An outpouring of anger against constricting authority may be a stage in the process of
self-liberation, but is not its end; anger, perpetuating division, perpetuates Moloch. In
fact, as the last line of Part II shows, such rage, futile in its beatings against the
stony consciousness of Moloch, at last turns back on the self in acts that are, however
zany, suicidal.
But in Part III, dramatically shifting from self-consuming rage to renewal in love, a
kind of self-integration, a balancing of destructive and creative impulses, is sought.
"Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland," Ginsberg begins, turning from angry
declamatory rhetoric to a simple, colloquial line, affectionate and reassuring in its
gently rocking rhythm. Repeated, this line becomes the base phrase for Part III, its
utterance each time followed by a response that further defines both Rockland and Solomon,
and this unfolding characterization provides the dramatic movement of this section as well
as the resolution of the entire poem. At first, the responses stress Rockland as prison
and Solomon as victim–
where you’re madder than I am
where you must feel very strange
where you imitate the shade of my mother–
but these are balanced against the following three responses, which stress the power of
the "madman" to transcend his mere physical imprisonment.
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
where you laugh at this invisible humor
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
A little more than halfway through, however, beginning with–
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it
should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse–
the answers begin to get longer, faster in movement, more surrealistic in imagery, as
they, proclaiming a social/political/religious/sexual revolution, affirm the transcendent
freedom of the self. Part III’s refrain thus establishes a context of emotional
support and spiritual communion, and it is from this "base," taking off in
increasingly more daring flights of rebellious energy, that Ginsberg finally arrives at
his "real" self.
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’
airplanes
roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital
illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run
outside
O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory
forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway
across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Again, boundaries ("imaginary walls") collapse, in a soaring moment of
apocalyptic release; and the self–which is "innocent and immortal"–breaks free
of Moloch, of whom Rockland’s walls are an extension. The poem, then, does not
close with the suicidal deliverance of Part II; nor does it end with a comic apocalypse
("O victory forget your underwear we’re free"); it closes, instead, with a
Whitmanesque image of love and reunion. "Howl" moves from the ordeal of
separation, through the casting out of the principle of division, toward unification, a
process that happens primarily within the self.
According to Ginsberg, Part III of "Howl" is a "litany of affirmation of
the Lamb in its glory." His repetition of the colloquial "I’m with you in
Rockland" turns it into an elevated liturgical chant. Words, no longer weapons as
they were in Part I, build a magical incantation which delivers us into a vision of the
"innocent" Lamb, the eternal Spirit locked inside Rockland, or inside the hard
surfaces of a defensive personality. Carl Solomon functions partly as a surrogate for
Naomi Ginsberg, still hospitalized in Pilgrim State when "Howl" was written;
Ginsberg, who hints as much in the poem ("where you imitate the shade of my
mother"), has recently conceded this to be the case. But less important than
identifying the real-life referents in the poem is to see that a literal person has been
transformed into eternal archetype, the Lamb of both Christian and Blakean mythology, and
that Ginsberg’s loving reassurance is primarily directed to this eternally innocent aspect
of himself. The refrain line in Part II articulates the human sympathy of the poet, while
his responses uncover his messianic and visionary self which at first rendered him
terrified and incommunicado but later yielded what Ginsberg calls in "Kaddish"
the "key" to unlock the door of the encapsulated self. "Howl" closes
with Ginsberg’s loving acceptance of–himself; the part of him that had been lost and
banished in time in The Gates of Wrath has been reborn ("dripping from a
sea-journey") and reintegrated. The mirror is no longer empty.
Yet this unity, occurring only in a dream, is attained by means of flight and return.
"Howl" struggles for autonomy, but Ginsberg, as he had when he moved to the West
Coast, keeps looking back over his shoulder, affirming his fidelity to Carl Solomon, to
Naomi Ginsberg, to images from his past life. Similarly, he says the tradition is "a
complete fuck-up so you’re on your own," but Ginsberg leans for support on Blake and
Whitman, both of whom he perceives as maternal, tender, and therefore non-threatening
authorities. Ginsberg in fact ends by withdrawing from the social, historical present
which he so powerfully creates in the poem. He stuffs the poem with things from
modern urban life; but materiality functions in the poem as a kind of whip, flagellating
Ginsberg into vision. Moloch, it seems, cannot be exorcised, only eluded through a
vertical transcendence; what starts out as a poem of social protest ends by retreating
into private religious/erotic vision, and Ginsberg’s tacit assumption of the
immutability of social reality establishes one respect in which he is a child of the
fifties rather than of the universe. Ginsberg decided not to "write a poem"
so that he could express his "real" self–which turned out to be his idealized
self: the Lamb in its glory. Confessional poetry often presents not an exposure but a
mythologizing of the self, as Plath’s poems strive to enact her transformation into
"the fine, white flying myth" of Ariel. In "Howl" Ginsberg wants to
recover an original wholeness that has been lost in time; he wants to preserve a
self-image which he can only preserve by keeping it separate from temporal, physical
reality. Compositional self-exploration turns out to be compositional self-idealization.
"The only way to be like Whitman is to write unlike Whitman," Williams
believed. Ginsberg certainly did take over some specific technical features of Whitman’s
work–the long line, the catalog, the syntactic parallelisms; he was in fact rereading Leaves
of Grass as he was working on "Howl." Is it possible, then, that in learning
to write unlike Williams Ginsberg ended up writing like Whitman and thus being like
neither of these independent and innovative poets? The answer, I think, is that while
Ginsberg did not accomplish the absolute fresh start that he sometimes liked to imagine,
he does not merely repeat the literary past. He imagines Whitman as the founder; Ginsberg
wants to move forward along lines initiated by the earlier writer. "Whitman’s form
had rarely been further explored," Ginsberg said; the character of his advance can be
defined by comparing the first two lines of one of Whitman’s long catalogs in "Song
of Myself "–
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter’s plane whistles its wild, ascending lisp,
with two lines near the beginning of Part I of "Howl":
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on
tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and
Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war
Both poets build a catalog out of long, end-stopped lines that are syntactically
parallel. Yet Whitman’s lines, each recording a single observed image in a
transparent style, are simple and move with an easy insouciance, while Ginsberg, an
embattled visionary, packs his lines with surrealistic images, and makes them move with an
almost manic intensity. As he does here, Ginsberg works throughout the poem by juxtaposing
the language of the street ("El," "staggering," "tenement
roofs," "illuminated") in electrifying ways. "Howl" thus arrives
at the visionary by way of the literal, as the poems in The Gates of Wrath did not;
and Ginsberg here creates "images / That strike like lightning from eternal
mind" rather than discussing the possibility. Ginsberg’s language incarnates
gaps–between street and heaven, literal and visionary–then leaps across them in "a
sudden flash." His use of "images juxtaposed" shows that Ginsberg came to
Whitman by way of the modern poets; but the resulting line is his own. The line serves an
expressive purpose in baring the tormented mystic consciousness of the poet; but it serves
a rhetorical purpose as well–seeking "to break people’s mind systems open" by
rationally subverting ("mechanical") consciousness and replacing it with a wild
associative logic which sees connections where before there were oppositions. As a final
example we can look at the line
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward
poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between
At first the line moves toward a terrifying dead-end ("blind streets") but
then the landscape is internalized ("in the mind") and a flash illuminates the
temporal world and releases "the archangel of the soul" from the dead-end of
time. As we have seen, the poem as a whole–immersing us in the literal and temporal, then
releasing us in a moment of vision–works in just this way.
By James E.B. Breslin. Copyright ? 1983, 1994 by University of Chicago