Howl

“Howl” comprises 4 parts. Part 1 is the longest, containing 78 wordy lines detailing the destruction of Ginsberg’s circle of friends. Line 1 describes these doomed individuals as “the best minds of my generation” (Line 1): Ginsberg qualifies this description by listing “who” he is referencing, including those “hallucinating / Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy […]” (Line 6), those “who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine […]” (Line 10), those “who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully […]” (Line 55), those “who scribbled all night rocking and rolling […]” (Line 51), those “who let themselves be f***** in the ass […]” (Line 36), those “who copulated ecstatic and insatiate […]” (Line 41), those “who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong [sic] & amnesia” (Line 67), and many others. These quotations define a bulk of the poem’s subjects. Line 6, for instance, mentions hallucinating, which references the Beat poets’ fervor for visionary, hallucinatory “truth.” The line also references Ginsberg’s own vision of William Blake, a major event in which Ginsberg found his poetic drive and his focus for parsing out the visionary in everyday life. These