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... heir intellectual practices are being accused of obscenity. They are in the land where they are labeled as mad, though nobody understands that the whole land is a big flat madhouse. There are different images of Rockland, which share the same theme of The Waste Land. In fact, Howl becomes a scream from a paddy wagon where even a scream has structure. Cynthia Ozick observes, Ginsberg's Howl, the single poem most representative of the break with Eliot, may owe as much, thematically, to The West Land as it does to the bardic Whitman or to the opening of the era of anything goes.
Ginsberg belongs to the generation that knew Elliot as sanctified, and, despite every irruption into indiscipline, Elliot continues in Ginsberg's ear. (Raskin: 2004, p- 24) Howl explicitly tells about sex, revealing Ginsberg's own homosexual orientation relating his friends Neal Cassady and Carl Solomon-to establish a sexually liberated playboy-a protest against state and the conservative norms of heterosexuality. Howl celebrates the cookman-men and their penises, not women and their vaginas. Ginsberg's cocks men have sex indiscriminately and scatter their seed freely to whom / ever come who may. Sometimes sex is depicted romantically; the homosexual sailors are human seraphim who provide caresses of / Atlantic and Caribbean love. Mostly there is a sense of despair and desperation about sex. The characters enjoy casual sex in empty lots and diner / backyards and in home town alleys.
Ginsberg's heroes hunger for sex much as they hunger for everything else in life, from food and wine to jazz and spirituality. Americans are insatiably hungry, he feels and always trying to feed the emptiness inside with things, images, and their own inflated ideas of themselves. The sexual hero of Howl is Neal Cassady, who appears the Adonis of Denver and who is a joy to / the memory of his innumerable lays of girls. Ginsberg describes Cassady flashing buttocks under barns and naked in lake, alluding, if obliquely, to his own sexual attraction to Cassady. But Ginsberg had to be careful to conceal the homosexual relationship that began in 1947, that they resumed in 1954, when Ginsberg arrived at Cassady's house in San Jose-Nowheresville- Carolyn Cassady called it. Writing about romantic love between men was still a taboo topic in 1940 s.
Men who have male muses had a morbid pathology, Robert Graves write. The main theme of poetry is, properly, the relations of men and women, rather than those of man and man. In writing about Neal, Jack, Bill, and others, Allen went against the grain, and he felt defensive about it. As late as 1981, he felt that he had to justify writing love poems about men and young boys. The poem Old Love Story in which he recounts and celebrates the theme of homosexual love through the ages is an example.
In Howl there is not a peep about their intense, sadomasochistic relationship. Rather, Ginsberg chooses to present Cassady as the Don Juan of the American West- a sexually liberated playboy to celebrate the prowess of the homosexual American male. Sexual images have a different kind of voice of protest in Howl. The beat people were exhibitionist, and they rebelled in the process of counter culture by being naked in public places.
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, This sexual image gives the voice to the protest against government. The police drags off the beat people during their exhibitionist rebellion. We also find Ginsberg attacking America directly saying, I am with you in Rockland / where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets. Though with revision, he moves that stanza from the end, moving the cottage in the Western night- which has been embedded in the text-to the conclusion. Here Ginsberg deliberately mocking the state with his homosexual identity.
These revealing sexual images establish themselves as integral part of counter culture. Howl tells about psychedelic drugs, there are references of incidents related to drugs and its effects; the center of attention is on the feelings of mind in psychedelic condition. The beat people focus on the intoxicated state of mind. They believe in the spiritual freedom through drugs. Driven by the appeal of the Sixties "drug guru", Harvard professor Timothy Leary, who advocated hallucinogenic drugs as a form of mind expansion, many young participated in recreational drug use, particularly marijuana (like cannabis, cannabis, and hashish) and hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocybin. Some hippies prize marijuana for its iconoclastic, illicit nature, as well as for its psycho pharmaceutical effects.
Some hippies used drugs to express their disaffection with societal norms. In Howl suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone- grind-ings refers W. S. Burroughs withdrawal from heroine. who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatories their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, This whole extract tells about the incident of car accident when Allen Ginsberg and his friends were going to hide some secret papers and marijuana in the farmhouse. The later lines depict the intoxication or the psychedelic condition of mind while taking drugs.
Actually drugs are a major factor of counterculture. The spiritual enlightenment can be experienced only through the intoxicated mind. So we observe the images related to drugs in Howl. Sensitivity for visionary experience with an eclectic taste for mystic, occult and magical phenomena has been a marked characteristic in Ginsberg's Howl. The unprecedented penchant for the occult, for magic, and for exotic ritual has become an integral part of counter culture. In Howl, the visionary experience is influenced by Zen, a Buddhist notion emphasizing on meditation and insight, a popular religion among young Americans.
The focus is on spiritualism related to body, earth, sex etc. The explanation for Ginsberg's liberating enlightenment has a remarkable anticipation of the Zen principle of the illuminated common place. Through Zen Ginsberg observes a beat that is far removed from the bear of dancing feet, but rather finds in the shuffling of human beings which is the mystic measure of their passions. In this visionary experience one can feel that the world may be redeemed by the willingness to take it for what it is and to find its enchanting promise within the seemingly di spiritualized waste. Ginsberg tells us that he did not find the Zen satori (state of spiritual enlightenment which is a spiritual objective of Zen) until 1954. Zen based pattern of life is dedicated to poverty, simplicity and meditation.
Zen is neither a proselytizing creed nor a theology, but, rather, a personal illumination that one may have to be tricked into experiencing while intellectually off guard. Thus the best way to teach Zen is to talk about anything but Zen, allowing the enlightening spark to breakthrough of its own unpredictable accord. Zen has a belief called antinomian ism, which means that the moral code cannot be universal as it is relative. Zen possesses its unusual vulnerability that is called adolescent ization. Zen, vulgarized, dovetails remarkably with a number of adolescent traits.
During May 1968, some American writers described Zen by saying that it is forbidden to forbid. who vanished into no where Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture, post cards of Atlantic city. In this extract we observe the reference of Zen, which may be making a solution with the image of trail through ambiguous pictures. Both Whitman and Ginsberg go through visionary experience by the influence of Zen. They take the celebration of body as the celebration of life and thus they can acquire the visionary, the true spiritual enlightenment. Among the young Americans their philosophy of having visionary becomes popular and it was called visionary outgoing.
Howl signifies breaking the conventions of arts and literature as the poem itself breaks the convention of poetry. This poem is called the inspiration poem, the poem created instantly based on immediate thoughts and feelings. Though Ginsberg revised Howl and though his revisions improved his poem significantly, he was unwilling to acknowledge the importance of revision in his work. The first thoughts are the best thoughts, he argues.
Recycled thoughts deny freshness. Register your thoughts when you have them, or when you first notice them. Cultivate the habit of noticing your mind and registering your own mind, too. Do not wait to be discovered. Discover yourself. Publish your own work and circulate your work. (Raskin: 2004, p- 16) This is how Ginsberg thinks about the creation of poetry or literature.
As in Howl he says, the use of the ellipse the catalogue the meter and the vibrating plane / incarnate gaps in time and space through images juxtaposed, referring his criticism against the norms of poetry. These meters, catalogues take away the real essence of poetry. It is a kind of burden for the poet, as he cannot express his feelings properly for these imposed rules. His approach goes against the established norms of poetry and thus it signifies the counterculture in literature. Howl also expresses the breakthrough of arts and music. Especially, the last section of the poem is really homage to arts.
We find Ginsberg using the word trapped for the archangel souls who are entangled between two visual images. It refers to the entrapment of arts in the modern society. Ginsberg wants to see the free soul, which can continue its creation with the proper rhythm of thought. A free artist can visualize his or her free thoughts to make the generation intellectually liberated.
And Ginsberg also tells about the spiritual freedom through feeling the true essence of music, especially jazz and spirituals. Whenever a literary piece goes with counterculture it must have messages for a certain nation or for the whole world and the messages we discover in Howl are universal. Ginsberg is a protest poet. But his protest does not run back to Marx; it reaches out, instead, to the ecstatic radicalism of Blake. The issue is never as simple as social justice; rather, the key words and images are those of time and eternity, madness and vision, heaven and spirit. The cry is not for a revolution, but for an apocalypse: a descent of divine fire.
In Howl, Ginsberg moves from futility to ecstasy, paranoia to inner peace, and from a sense of terror to a sense of holiness. He captures the feelings of doom and despair that many Americans experienced in the wake of World War II. And he records the American sense of renewal and rebirth. Ginsberg's America is both hell and paradise.
In Howl he finally writes a poem to match the immense persona that he has in mind for himself for years- the persona of an American prophet. From bits and pieces of his own life and from the bits and pieces of the nation itself he creates a work that is beautiful in an ugly graceful way, to borrow a phrase of Jack Kerouacs. By following his own muse he found his own voice and by expressing his own madness he disclosed much of the madness of America. Thus, the celebration of all basic features of counterculture makes it a perfect counterculture manifesto. Howl has been embraced by bohemians, hipsters, beats, hippies- by nonconformists in Prague and Peking, existentialists in Paris, and poets in provincial towns. Howl is a visionary scream against a century of murder and Ginsberg becomes a global sanity.
With passion and precision-and from a sense of anomie and terror- Allen Ginsberg tells the truth, as best he can, about himself, the world, and the cosmos. Ginsberg insists and aims for candor, accurate candor, total candor in his poetry. Howl is explosive- as befitting a poem for the atomic age- and yet it is also symmetrical. In Howl Ginsberg is at his most original.
In Howl, he moved American poetry forward, forging a global tradition of poetry that includes Whitman, Eliot, Rimbaud, Williams, and a bit of Garcia Lorca and Mayakovsky, too. Eliot wrote, Every supreme poet, classic or not, tends to exhaust the ground he cultivates. In Howl, Ginsberg exhausts the ground he cultivates through the manifestation of counterculture. Works Cited: Raskin, Jonah. American Scream. California.
University of California Press: 2004. Road, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. New York. Doubleday & Company: 1969.
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Research essay sample on Ginsberg Howl A Counterculture Manifesto
