20. Beat generation

1. WHO

2. MOLOCH

3. HOLY

4. ROCKLAND

• these words are in the particular parts of the poem repeated again and again

• it’s an example of anaphora

• we can find there, examples of personification as well – when something that isn’t human is given human attributes (“I saw the best mind of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ... – minds are starving!”).

• form (very long divided in 4 parts), diction (language which he is using is confusing), fluidity, clarity (not everybody understands)

• WHO – who refers to the Beats, to the young people who are different from others

• MOLOCH – is the biblical name of a god associated with child sacrifice, to sacrifice himself he has to eat a children (Ginsberg compares a society to Moloch)

• ROCKLAND – represents the psychiatric hospital where have been with Solomon in 1949

• howl shows madness to be a kind of elevated state (zvýšený stav) filled with hallucinations and visions

• But it can simply be terrifying, as when Carl Solomon thinks he is losing „the game of the pingpong of the abyss“

• the poem contains lots of historical references to psychiatric hospitals that seem straight out of the Jack Nicholson movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo´s Nest (based on a book written by Ginsberg´s friend Ken Kesey): lobotomies, shock therapy, angry nurses, and more

• there are also a lot of geographical references: NYC, San Francisco, Kansas, Colorado, Battery Park, Bellevue (mental asylum)

• there is a lot of sex in this poem

• no widely distributed American poem has such geographic descriptions of sexuality before Howl, which was originally declared obscene by the US government

• Ginsberg wrote Howl after a long struggle to come to grips with his identity as a gay man

Luther Nichols: „It´s a howl of pain. Figuratively speaking his toes have been stepped on. He´s poetically putting his cry of pain and protest into this book Howl. He´s employing the jazz phraseology here. I think he´s also employing the words he heard in his life on the road and in his various experiences. I think I understand the general significance of the words and the general context. I would say he was attempting to show the lack of inhibition in the persons he´s talking …the post WW2 generation…those who returned, went into college or went into work immediately after WW2, perhaps were somewhat displaced by the chaos of the war and didn´t immediately settle down.”

• on June, the bookstore manager, was arrested and jailed for selling Howl and Other Poems to an undercover San Francisco police officer

• city Lights Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was subsequently arrested for publishing the book

• at the obscenity trial, nine literary experts testified on the poem's behalf

• supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case when California State Superior Court Judge decided that the poem was of "redeeming social importance"

• this event made Howl even more famous and bring wider readership

• this was also a key event in the American history of Literature because it set a new standard what is obscene and what is not

• it opened a door for other poems like Howl