Sexual Alienation In Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'

The world was in 1950 at a point of multiple crossroads. After two World Wars an exemplary series of bad events followed, like the Cold War and the atomic menace. But it was also the beginning of some prosperity. People started again to gather material values. Nevertheless, the slow awakening from the fog of war was a process too complex to be generally accepted. In an apparently healing world there were still too many fears and too many left behind. On this ground of alienation, isolation and despair Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” emerged together with the Beat movement. John Tytell observed that the “Beat begins with a sense of natural displacement and disaffiliation, a distrust of efficient truth, and an awareness that things are often not what

in J.C. Shakespeare). “Howl” shocked at that time and continues to shock even today. This essay will try at first to analyse the mechanisms of the explicit language and how Ginsberg used it to attain his own sexual liberation. Secondly will try to underline that the usage of the explicit language was the key element of the whole poem, being actually the guarantee to his undeniable success. Finally, using some recent interpretations, this essay will try to depict how the new obtained sexual freedom, Ginsberg’s affirmed homosexuality, led the public perception to a paradoxical being of a marginalized conformist and a sort of popular hero, at least for the fans.

Allen Ginsberg confessed the intention to “defy the system of academic poetry, official reviews, New York publishing machinery, national sobriety and generally accepted standards to good taste” (qtd. in Tyler Hoffman 128). These were the poet’s answers to decay and disillusion. The technique used to deny the tradition was similar to the Dadaist approach by using spontaneity as a method of composition. Ginsberg, being part of the Beat movement, tried to establish a new tradition, and a new perspective regarding the world, all carefully wrapped in a less academic view. They had “A profound love of poetry, a belief in the vitality and integrity of