Howl - Theme& Style

This was one of the largest and most challenging project I wrote during my 9th grade literature class. My group was asked to pick a poem from a list my teacher provided. We stumbled upon a 112-line poem. The name is Howl, it is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg back in the 50s. You can check out the poem here. We were shocked at the length of the poem at first but decided to choose and present it to the class.

The theme was the part I chose to analyze and present. The style was me helping my piers and guiding them to the right conclusion.

This analysis is helped by the website Shmoop, you can check out the article right here.

Please enjoy.

Theme

In connection from the speaker’s perspective throughout the poem. One theme that stood out in the perspective part is religion. Religion is shown throughout the poem as figures. Many figures are shown such as Jesus, Muhammad, and Moloch. Moloch is the one I’m going to focusing on today since it’s shown most. Moloch is mentioned repeatedly in stanza 2 as the person who destroyed the “best mind”. Moloch is mentioned in Hebrew Bible in being an idolatrous God who people would sacrifice their children to. That was how Moloch was referred to in a religious context, but in this poem, Moloch was represented as a power of capitalism, negativity, and the bad side of government. We know this from numerous descriptions of Moloch including: “Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! ", “Moloch the incomprehensible prison” and “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!”. These quotes figuratively describe the government and negativity. Moreover, the speaker also expressed his/her thoughts on religion. The thought being that he/she does not believe in religion or any form of super natural being. We can see those thoughts from these line “Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!”, “…religions! The whole boatload of sensitive bull****!” and “who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation.” Which came from the first and second stanza. In summary, the theme of religion is viewed as a hoax or negative thing for the speaker.

The second theme in this poem is madness. Madness in which isn’t all about the emotion of being angry, but the crazy, destructive, and hallucination idea. The theme is represented throughout the poem with a story line behind each stanza. I’ll take the first and second stanza as an example. In the first stanza, the speaker talks about “the best mind of my generation destroyed by madness”. Madness is then showed throughout the first stanza using who followed by a verb. These madness's, include “dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn” “wandered around at midnight in the railroad” and smoking marijuana in New York. All of these action shows how crazy and destructive these best minds became. No normal people would wonder around at midnight or publicly smoke weed. The second stanza then comes into play; the speaker blames the destruction towards the Hebrew god named Moloch which Tan previously talked about. The whole poem is a warning from the speaker to us, to avoid the madness hidden inside drugs and capitalism.

Style

In this poem Ginsberg wrote big three stanza. You can see that every line is very long. With each stanza using parallelism, which is repeated the words and sentence that has been used over and over again. Each stanza has a different parallelism. We can take the 3rd stanza as an example, the phrase “I’m in Rockland” followed by “where” can be view here. This use of parallelism is used throughout the poem, this represents one of the themes of confinement.

The speaker was once stuck or confined in a place call Rockland. The lock in template and parallelism used here represents that feeling in which the speaker is locked up in Rockland and couldn’t leave. Parallelism is the use of the same words or sentences over and over again, this is the same for confinement, in which the person is locked in doing the same thing every day over and over again.