Who Is Allen Ginsberg's Howl?

Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997) was an American poet from the Beat Generation, a literary movement that greatly influenced culture and society in the United States during the 1950s and gave way to the counterculture known as the hippie movement. The Beat Generation fought and wrote against militarism, sexual repression and the consumerist society created by Capitalism; and embraced Eastern religions, the use of drugs and queerness.

In this essay, my aim is to analyze Allen Ginsberg’s views on the United States as depicted in his most famous poem, Howl, which was published in 1956 and caused a lot of controversy due to its explicit content and savage critic to Capitalism.

Howl is dedicated to Carl Solomon, a fellow writer he met during his time

With the use of raw explicit scenes, which are a clear statement against censorship too, and extremely visual metaphors, Ginsberg describes American society as an enslaved one, alienated by Moloch (or Capitalism) and heteronormativity, while those who dare fight against it, the best minds of his generation, end up locked in madhouses or committing suicide. The only way to beating that machinery of Capitalism was freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of sexuality, freedom of ideology and religion and freedom from all of the money-established rules. In the last line of Howl, Ginsberg says: “I'm with you in Rockland / in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night” . Ginsberg hopes for the day Carl Solomon will be allowed to leave the psychiatric institution and be who he really is. While this poem directed at his friend, it can be extrapolated as a message for all the people who are oppressed by the system, an affirmation that, yes, they exist and have the right to live; and is also, of course, a harsh critic against capitalist America, a declaration of their reality and their resolve not to falter under the pressure of the mainstream