Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

Howl

(The original prose in italics and my comments in plain text)

Allen Ginsberg's monumental poem was first heard in a series of famous readings that signaled the arrival of the Beat Generation of writers. The first of these readings took place in October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. It was Allen Ginsberg's first public performance, and it made him instantly famous at the age of twenty-nine.

The lines in the famous first part of the poem tumble over each other in long unbroken breaths, all adding to a single endless sentence

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ...

Ginsberg is describing his fellow travelers, the crazy, lonely members of his community of misunderstood poet artists, unpublished novelists, psychotics, radicals, pranksters, sexual deviants and junkies. At the time that he wrote this he'd seen several of his promising young friends broken or killed.

Each of these describe real-life events by people Ginsberg knew, but the poem is especially dedicated to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's crazy-insane hyper-intellectual friend who he'd met in a mental hospital years before:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

Ginsberg refers to the current “ Beat Generation “ which was a mix of redundant lives with lost identities, driven to poverty due to lofty ideals and not much work or recognition of their talent causing them to drown their anger in drugs which were then as now sold at the hands of the then still politically in correct ‘niggers’.

angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

Here he refers to the inherent innocence of the generation and more specifically of his friends corrupted by dope in the expectation of utopia in a world that seemed to drag on endlessly without any purpose like a machine! He refers to the living conditions of their, which often translated into leaky cold flats usually without any power or heating at the edge of cities. Discussing

Here the spirit of the generation is vividly expressed, as even though they did not have anything they had the spirit to dream of something that was bigger then them all but not knowing what it was.

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York.

He we can clearly see the anger in Ginsberg’s writing where he writes about his friends and probably himself wasting their intelligence gaping at prostitutes at the tenement’s, scorning the religion they professed to.

At the failure of education system through which they passed, which made them dream

(Hallucinating) in the light of their new knowledge of Blake and other scholars, for making them dream loftily but not preparing them fro the world.(The beat generation considered the classics as fantastical and unreal ! ).

Once they ventured out in the world armed with their newly acquired knowledge into the arms of an era that saw a generation of broken kids from war trying to cope with the horrors that they witnessed, banished from society for revealing that which reveled the contemporary ideals of the American life.

Living in cheap motels listening to young girls being raped for money while sitting at the edge of a fire burning in a waste basket getting wasted on dope, completely broke and reduced to peddling drugs smuggled in their anal rectums or vagina’s to New York.