"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.
This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair use
provisions of US and international copyright law and agreement, and it may be archived and
redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright
information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and
no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution or republication of this text on
other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press.
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 up some
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