It wasn’t until I heard Ginsberg read “Howl” in its entirety that intended argument was fully clear to me. Throughout the first section of “Howl”, Ginsberg catalogues for the reader a philosophical yearbook of his peers, the “best minds of [his] generation,” and their collective struggle against the hypocrisy and criminality of the industrial state and the soul-crippling effects of the emerging capitalist super-power, the likes of which the world has never seen—while simultaneously grappling with addiction and the resulting madness of shattered illusions. Throughout the first section of “Howl”, the themes of poverty, internal-struggle, addiction and alienation are immediately apparent, but Ginsberg juxtaposes these ubiquitous images of darkness with “platonic conversationalists” and sentimental youths who “wept at the romance of the streets.” I feel Ginsberg intentionally romances these attitudes in effort to prove what he ultimately does in the last sections of the poem—a reconciliation and a decisive attitude that denies the machinery and smothered identity of the “innocent flannel suits.”
Part Two of “Howl” begins with the image of Moloch the machine that “bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination,” their referring to the American collective and particularly the young minds sacrificed in the name of God and Country in Part One. I feel Ginsberg chose machinery as the cause of ultimate destruction, rather than self-inflicted destruction, due to the obvious supreme industrialization and colonization of the period in which the poem was written, but also a machine serves as a symbol of something that is more powerful than man. A machine, though built by the hands of men, is built only to do the work that a man cannot do. It is eventual that the power of the machine will become greater than man because the mind will begin to believe that it cannot function without the help of the machine. Even if one considers the “machine” as a political entity, religious institution or other controlling body rather than a collection of mechanical parts, the sentiment remains the same. The last lines of Part Two identify the city and Moloch as newly divine entities after they have been lifted to the heavens on the backs of the men, signifying again that the power of the created machine is merely illusory. Moving away from this image, the last lines struck me as a return to fundamentals. “They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! To solitude! Waving! Carrying flowers! Down to the river! Into the street!”; this line struck me in particular as a generation’s call to reconcile the fact that the “machine” does not hold power; one may “jump off” at any given point and return to their own visions of truth and reality.
Part Three solidifies the speaker’s place within this community; the repetition of “I’m with you in Rockland” serves to solidify the culminating theme of reconciliation—the place of the individual in the world is correlated to but not directly dependent upon the movement and expansion of a political body, industrial station, cultural stigma or a religious institution. The selection of words such as “journey,” “dream”, “America” and “western” provide me with a nostalgic longing for that which exists in the collective unconscious—the desire to follow the path of your dreams and explore the horizon despite the horrors of a world that persistently calls your name and ask you to sign up.
