Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956) is the best-known poem produced by the literary movement called the Beat Generation—not to mention one of the most controversial and influential poems of the 20th century. Dedicated to Ginsberg's friend Carl Solomon, who had been confined to a psychiatric institution, the poem is a lament for "the best minds of [Ginsberg's] generation," whom it portrays as having been "destroyed by madness." But it's also a tribute to rebellious artists, thinkers, and hipsters and an attack on the oppressiveness of western society, something it depicts as crushingly conformist, greedy, and violent. With affectionate sympathy, the poem ultimately suggests that the "mad" rebels are really the only sane exceptions to the insane culture of 20th-century America. Written in 1954-'55 and published in Howl and Other Poems (1956), "Howl" became an instant literary sensation and the target of censorship for its graphic language and sexual themes. Its victory in a 1957 obscenity trial paved the way for the publication of other controversial literature in the 1950s and '60s.

• Read the full text of “Howl”

• “Howl” Summary

• “Howl” Themes

  • 

    Nonconformity vs. Mainstream Society

    Where this theme appears in the poem:

    • Before Line 1
    • Lines 1-78
    • Between Lines 78-79
    • Lines 79-93
    • Between Lines 93-94
    • Lines 94-112
    • After Line 112
  • 

    The Oppressive Violence of the American System

    Where this theme appears in the poem:

    • Lines 31-35
    • Line 56
    • Lines 66-67
    • Line 77
    • Lines 79-93
    • Lines 107-112
  • 

    Madness and Visionary Thinking

    Where this theme appears in the poem:

    • Before Line 1
    • Lines 1-78
    • Between Lines 78-79
    • Lines 79-93
    • Between Lines 93-94
    • Lines 94-112
    • After Line 112

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Howl”

  • Line 1

    I saw the ... starving hysterical naked,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 2-3

    dragging themselves through ...
    ... machinery of night,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 4-5

    who poverty and ...
    ... tenement roofs illuminated,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 6-7

    who passed through ...
    ... of the skull,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 8-9

    who cowered in ...
    ... for New York,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 10-11

    who ate fire ...
    ... and endless balls,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 12-13

    incomparable blind streets ...
    ... light of mind,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 14-15

    who chained themselves ...
    ... the hydrogen jukebox,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 16-19

    who talked continuously ...
    ... on the pavement,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 20-22

    who vanished into ...
    ... no broken hearts,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 23-26

    who lit cigarettes ...
    ... in supernatural ecstasy,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 27-29

    who jumped in ...
    ... in fireplace Chicago,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 30-32

    who reappeared on ...
    ... ferry also wailed,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 33-35

    who broke down ...
    ... genitals and manuscripts,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 36-39

    who let themselves ...
    ... with a sword,

    

    

    

    

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  • Line 40

    who lost their ... the craftsman’s loom,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 41-43

    who copulated ecstatic ...
    ... hometown alleys too,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 44-46

    who faded out ...
    ... laurel in oblivion,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 47-52

    who ate the ...
    ... pure vegetable kingdom,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 53-56

    who plunged themselves ...
    ... of Absolute Reality,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 57-58

    who jumped off ...
    ... of colossal steamwhistles,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 59-61

    who barreled down ...
    ... for her heroes,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 62-64

    who fell on ...
    ... daisychain or grave,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 65-68

    who demanded sanity ...
    ... briefly in catatonia,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 69-72

    returning years later ...
    ... soup of time—

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 73-75

    and who therefore ...
    ... and endless head,

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 76-78

    the madman bum ...
    ... a thousand years.

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 79-82

    What sphinx of ...
    ... the stunned governments!

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 83-85

    Moloch whose mind ...
    ... is the Mind!

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 86-88

    Moloch in whom ...
    ... cocks! monstrous bombs!

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 89-93

    They broke their ...
    ... into the street!

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 94-99

    Carl Solomon! I’m ...
    ... same dreadful typewriter

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 100-105

    I’m with you ...
    ... an armed madhouse

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 106-109

    I’m with you ...
    ... of the Internationale

    

    

    

    

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  • Lines 110-112

    I’m with you ...
    ... the Western night

    

    

    

    

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• “Howl” Symbols

  • 

    Moloch/Sphinx

    Where this symbol appears in the poem:

    • Lines 79-93: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! / Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! / Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! / Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! / Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! / Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! / Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! / Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! / Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! / They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! / Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! / Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! / Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! / Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!”

• “Howl” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

  • Anaphora

    

    

    

    

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    Where anaphora appears in the poem:

    • Line 4: “who”
    • Line 5: “who”
    • Line 6: “who”
    • Line 7: “who”
    • Line 8: “who”
    • Line 9: “who”
    • Line 10: “who”
    • Line 11: “with,” “with,” “with”
    • Line 14: “who”
    • Line 15: “who”
    • Line 16: “who”
    • Line 20: “who”
    • Line 22: “who”
    • Line 23: “who”
    • Line 24: “who”
    • Line 25: “who”
    • Line 26: “who”
    • Line 27: “who”
    • Line 28: “who”
    • Line 29: “who”
    • Line 30: “who”
    • Line 31: “who”
    • Line 32: “who”
    • Line 33: “who”
    • Line 34: “who”
    • Line 35: “who ”
    • Line 36: “who”
    • Line 38: “who”
    • Line 39: “who”
    • Line 40: “who”
    • Line 41: “who”
    • Line 42: “who”
    • Line 43: “who”
    • Line 44: “who”
    • Line 45: “who”
    • Line 46: “who”
    • Line 47: “who”
    • Line 48: “who”
    • Line 49: “who”
    • Line 50: “who”
    • Line 51: “who”
    • Line 52: “who”
    • Line 53: “who”
    • Line 54: “who”
    • Line 55: “who”
    • Line 56: “who,” “& the,” “& the,” “& the”
    • Line 57: “who”
    • Line 58: “who”
    • Line 59: “who”
    • Line 60: “who”
    • Line 61: “who,” “who,” “who,” “who”
    • Line 62: “who”
    • Line 63: “who,” “who”
    • Line 64: “who”
    • Line 65: “who”
    • Line 66: “who”
    • Line 67: “who”
    • Line 68: “who”
    • Line 71: “and,” “and,” “and,” “and,” “and”
    • Line 73: “who”
    • Line 74: “who”
    • Line 80: “Moloch”
    • Line 81: “Moloch,” “Moloch,” “Moloch the”
    • Line 82: “Moloch the,” “Moloch the,” “Moloch,” “Moloch the,” “Moloch the”
    • Line 83: “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose”
    • Line 84: “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose”
    • Line 85: “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose,” “Moloch whose”
    • Line 86: “Moloch in whom,” “Moloch in whom”
    • Line 87: “Moloch,” “Moloch,” “Moloch,” “Moloch”
    • Line 88: “Moloch,” “Moloch”
    • Line 93: “They,” “the,” “the,” “They,” “They”
    • Lines 94-94: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you’re”
    • Lines 95-95: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 96-96: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 97-97: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you’ve”
    • Lines 98-98: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 99-99: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where”
    • Lines 100-100: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where your”
    • Lines 101-101: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where”
    • Lines 102-102: “I'm with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 103-103: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 104-104: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 105-105: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 106-106: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where”
    • Lines 107-107: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 108-108: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you”
    • Lines 109-109: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where”
    • Lines 110-110: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where”
    • Lines 111-111: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where”
    • Line 111: “O,” “O,” “O”
    • Line 112: “I’m with you in Rockland”

  • Repetition

    

    

    

    

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    Where repetition appears in the poem:

    • Line 10: “night after night”
    • Line 22: “around and around”
    • Line 23: “boxcars boxcars boxcars”
    • Line 25: “visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels”
    • Line 32: “wailed,” “wailed,” “wailed”
    • Line 40: “shrews,” “the one eyed shrew,” “the one eyed shrew,” “the one eyed shrew”
    • Line 60: “had a vision,” “had a vision,” “had a vision”
    • Line 61: “Denver,” “Denver,” “Denver,” “Denver,” “Denver,” “Denver”
    • Line 67: “therapy,” “therapy,” “therapy”
    • Line 72: “not safe,” “not safe”
    • Line 77: “eli eli lamma lamma”
    • Line 81: “Moloch! Moloch!,” “Moloch! Moloch,” “Moloch! Moloch”
    • Line 86: “in Moloch,” “in Moloch,” “in Moloch”
    • Line 88: “Moloch! Moloch!”
    • Line 110: “the United States,” “the United States”

  • Apostrophe

    

    

    

    

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    Where apostrophe appears in the poem:

    • Line 72: “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—”
    • Lines 94-112: “Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland /    where you’re madder than I am / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you must feel very strange / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you imitate the shade of my mother / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you laugh at this invisible humor / I’m with you in Rockland /    where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter / I’m with you in Rockland /    where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio / I’m with you in Rockland /    where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses / I'm with you in Rockland /    where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse / I’m with you in Rockland /    where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb / I’m with you in Rockland /    where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale / I’m with you in Rockland /    where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep / I’m with you in Rockland /    where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside    O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory forget your underwear we’re free / 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”

  • Personification

    

    

    

    

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    Where personification appears in the poem:

    • Line 26: “when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,”
    • Line 40: “who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,”
    • Line 44: “hung-over with heartless Tokay”
    • Line 56: “or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,”
    • Line 61: “& now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,”
    • Line 77: “an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio”
    • Lines 79-89: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! / Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! / Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! / Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! / Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! / Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! / Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! / Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! / Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! / They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!”
    • Line 110: “   where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep”

  • Imagery

    

    

    

    

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    Where imagery appears in the poem:

    • Lines 1-23
    • Lines 24-43
    • Lines 43-59
    • Lines 62-71
    • Lines 72-74
    • Line 75
    • Lines 77-78
    • Lines 79-80
    • Lines 82-85
    • Line 85
    • Line 86
    • Line 87
    • Lines 88-89
    • Line 90
    • Line 91
    • Line 92
    • Lines 92-93
    • Lines 97-97
    • Lines 99-106
    • Lines 108-112

  • Alliteration

    

    

    

    

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    Where alliteration appears in the poem:

    • Line 1: “minds,” “my”
    • Line 3: “angelheaded,” “hipsters,” “ancient,” “heavenly”
    • Line 4: “hollow-eyed,” “high,” “sat,” “smoking,” “supernatural,” “flats floating”
    • Line 5: “bared,” “brains”
    • Line 8: “unshaven,” “underwear”
    • Line 9: “busted,” “beards”
    • Line 11: “dreams,” “drugs,” “with waking”
    • Line 13: “kind king”
    • Line 14: “Battery,” “Bronx,” “benzedrine,” “battered bleak,” “brain,” “drained,” “brilliance,” “drear”
    • Line 15: “sank,” “submarine,” “sat,” “stale”
    • Line 16: “park,” “pad,” “bar,” “Bellevue,” “Brooklyn Bridge”
    • Line 20: “nowhere,” “New,” “picture postcards”
    • Line 21: “suffering,” “sweats”
    • Line 22: “wondering where”
    • Line 24: “Plotinus Poe”
    • Line 25: “streets,” “seeking”
    • Line 27: “streetlight smalltown”
    • Line 28: “lounged,” “hungry,” “lonesome,” “Houston,” “sex,” “soup,” “task,” “took”
    • Line 32: “wailed,” “Wall”
    • Line 34: “committing,” “crime”
    • Line 37: “blew,” “blown by,” “seraphim,” “sailors”
    • Line 38: “public parks,” “cemeteries scattering,” “semen,” “whomever,” “who”
    • Line 40: “lost,” “loveboys,” “winks,” “womb”
    • Line 41: “bottle,” “beer,” “cunt,” “come”
    • Line 42: “sweetened,” “snatches,” “sweeten,” “snatch,” “sunrise,” “buttocks,” “barns”
    • Line 43: “who,” “whoring,” “rickety rows”
    • Line 44: “hung-over,” “heartless,” “horrors”
    • Line 49: “boxes breathing”
    • Line 51: “rocking,” “rolling”
    • Line 54: “day,” “decade”
    • Line 57: “Brooklyn Bridge”
    • Line 58: “broken,” “barefoot”
    • Line 61: “Denver,” “died,” “Denver”
    • Line 63: “sang sweet”
    • Line 65: “hands,” “hung”
    • Line 66: “heads,” “harlequin,” “speech,” “suicide”
    • Line 68: “who,” “humorless,” “overturned only”
    • Line 70: “rocking,” “rolling”
    • Line 71: “fantastic,” “flung,” “hopeful,” “hallucination”
    • Line 72: “total,” “time”
    • Line 73: “variable,” “vibrating”
    • Line 75: “poor,” “prose,” “stand,” “speechless,” “shaking,” “shame”
    • Line 76: “bum,” “beat”
    • Line 77: “rose reincarnate,” “sabacthani saxophone”
    • Line 78: “butchered,” “bodies”
    • Line 79: “sphinx,” “cement”
    • Line 81: “Mental Moloch”
    • Line 82: “crossbone,” “soulless,” “Congress,” “sorrows”
    • Line 83: “Moloch,” “mind,” “machinery! Moloch,” “money! Moloch”
    • Line 84: “skyscrapers stand,” “streets”
    • Line 85: “Moloch,” “Mind”
    • Line 86: “Moloch,” “Crazy,” “Cocksucker,” “manless,” “Moloch”
    • Line 88: “suburbs! skeleton”
    • Line 89: “broke,” “backs,” “trees,” “tons”
    • Line 91: “boatload,” “bullshit”
    • Line 92: “screams,” “suicides”
    • Line 100: “reported,” “radio”
    • Line 104: “scream,” “straightjacket”
    • Line 105: “innocent,” “immortal”
    • Line 109: “singing,” “stanzas”
    • Line 111: “where,” “wake,” “skinny,” “starry-spangled”
    • Line 112: “dreams,” “dripping”

  • Assonance

    

    

    

    

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    Where assonance appears in the poem:

    • Line 1: “minds,” “my”
    • Line 2: “negro streets”
    • Line 3: “heavenly connection”
    • Line 5: “Heaven,” “El,” “roofs illuminated”
    • Line 6: “cool,” “hallucinating”
    • Line 10: “Paradise Alley”
    • Line 12: “lightning,” “mind”
    • Line 13: “green tree,” “teahead,” “neon,” “ashcan rantings,” “kind,” “light,” “mind”
    • Line 14: “down,” “mouth-wracked,” “battered,” “brain,” “drained”
    • Line 15: “night,” “light”
    • Line 16: “park,” “bar,” “Bellevue,” “museum,” “Brooklyn Bridge”
    • Line 17: “platonic conversationalists”
    • Line 18: “yacketayakking,” “facts,” “shocks,” “hospitals”
    • Line 21: “bone-grindings,” “migraines,” “China”
    • Line 23: “snow,” “lonesome”
    • Line 24: “Plotinus Poe,” “bop kabbalah,” “cosmos”
    • Line 27: “winter midnight streetlight”
    • Line 28: “through Houston”
    • Line 30: “West,” “investigating,” “FBI”
    • Line 32: “Los Alamos”
    • Line 33: “crying,” “white”
    • Line 34: “detectives,” “neck”
    • Line 38: “morning,” “evenings,” “semen freely,” “whomever,” “who”
    • Line 40: “snip,” “intellectual”
    • Line 41: “hall,” “wall,” “ultimate cunt,” “come”
    • Line 42: “buttocks under,” “naked,” “lake”
    • Line 43: “secret hero,” “cocksman,” “Adonis,” “caves,” “waitresses,” “roadside lonely petticoat,” “solipsisms,” “johns”
    • Line 44: “stumbled,” “unemployment”
    • Line 45: “walked all”
    • Line 46: “created great,” “blue,” “moon”
    • Line 52: “borsht,” “tortillas”
    • Line 53: “plunged,” “under,” “trucks”
    • Line 54: “cast,” “ballot,” “fell,” “heads every,” “day,” “next decade”
    • Line 55: “successively unsuccessfully,” “forced,” “stores”
    • Line 56: “Madison Avenue,” “blasts,” “sinister intelligent editors,” “taxicabs,” “Absolute”
    • Line 57: “Brooklyn Bridge,” “actually happened,” “even,” “free beer”
    • Line 58: “leaped,” “negroes,” “finished,” “whiskey,” “groaning,” “moans”
    • Line 59: “hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch”
    • Line 60: “hours,” “out”
    • Line 61: “waited,” “vain,” “over Denver”
    • Line 62: “knees,” “cathedrals”
    • Line 63: “charm,” “hearts”
    • Line 64: “Harvard,” “Narcissus,” “daisychain,” “grave”
    • Line 65: “insanity,” “hands”
    • Line 66: “CCNY lecturers,” “subsequently presented themselves”
    • Line 67: “hydrotherapy psychotherapy”
    • Line 68: “symbolic pingpong”
    • Line 70: “soul,” “rolling,” “solitude-bench dolmen-realms,” “life,” “nightmare”
    • Line 73: “flash,” “alchemy”
    • Line 74: “made incarnate,” “Space,” “sensation,” “Pater,” “Aeterna Deus”
    • Line 75: “shaking,” “shame,” “rejected yet confessing,” “endless head”
    • Line 77: “ghostly clothes,” “lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone,” “shivered,” “cities”
    • Line 79: “ate,” “brains”
    • Line 81: “heavy,” “men”
    • Line 82: “Congress,” “sorrows,” “stunned governments”
    • Line 83: “blood,” “running money”
    • Line 84: “croak,” “smoke-stacks”
    • Line 86: “Cocksucker,” “Moloch,” “Lacklove”
    • Line 88: “skeleton treasuries,” “cocks! monstrous bombs!”
    • Line 89: “lifting,” “city”
    • Line 90: “Visions! omens! hallucinations!”
    • Line 91: “adorations! illuminations! religions!”
    • Line 92: “flips,” “crucifixions”
    • Line 93: “yells,” “They bade,” “farewell,” “flowers! Down”
    • Line 94: “Solomon,” “Rockland”
    • Line 96: “imitate,” “shade”
    • Line 97: “twelve secretaries”
    • Line 104: “pingpong,” “abyss”
    • Line 106: “Rockland,” “shocks”
    • Line 107: “fascist national”
    • Line 108: “superhuman tomb”
    • Line 109: “mad comrades”
    • Line 111: “coma,” “own,” “bombs,” “hospital,” “mercy,” “eternal”

  • Asyndeton

    

    

    

    

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    Where asyndeton appears in the poem:

    • Line 1: “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,”
    • Line 4: “smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,”
    • Line 17: “jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,”
    • Line 18: “yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering”
    • Line 38: “who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries”
    • Line 41: “with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle”
    • Line 89: “Pavements, trees, radios, tons!”

  • Metaphor

    

    

    

    

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    Where metaphor appears in the poem:

    • Line 3: “the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”
    • Line 5: “who bared their brains to Heaven”
    • Line 7: “the windows of the skull”
    • Line 8: “unshaven rooms”
    • Line 9: “pubic beards”
    • Line 10: “purgatoried their torsos”
    • Line 13: “kind king light of mind”
    • Line 15: “submarine light of Bickford’s,” “the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox”
    • Line 17: “a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists”
    • Line 18: “eyeball kicks”
    • Line 19: “whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,”
    • Line 20: “nowhere Zen New Jersey”
    • Line 23: “grandfather night”
    • Line 31: “the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism”
    • Line 32: “while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down”
    • Line 33: “the machinery of other skeletons”
    • Line 34: “wild cooking pederasty and intoxication”
    • Line 37: “those human seraphim, the sailors”
    • Line 39: “when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword”
    • Line 40: “the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom”
    • Line 41: “the last gyzym of consciousness”
    • Line 42: “prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise”
    • Line 43: “especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns”
    • Line 46: “the wartime blue floodlight of the moon,” “their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion”
    • Line 47: “who ate the lamb stew of the imagination”
    • Line 50: “under the tubercular sky”
    • Line 52: “dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom”
    • Line 54: “& alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade”
    • Line 56: “who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,”
    • Line 59: “hotrod-Golgotha,” “Birmingham jazz incarnation”
    • Line 61: “and finally went away to find out the Time”
    • Line 62: “the soul illuminated its hair for a second”
    • Line 63: “who crashed through their minds in jail”
    • Line 66: “harlequin speech of suicide”
    • Line 67: “the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia”
    • Line 69: “a wig of blood, and tears and fingers”
    • Line 70: “bickering with the echoes of the soul,” “the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love,” “dream of life a nightmare,” “bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon”
    • Line 72: “and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time”
    • Line 73: “the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane”
    • Line 74: “trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images,” “set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus”
    • Line 75: “in his naked and endless head”
    • Line 77: “the ghostly clothes of jazz,” “the suffering of America’s naked mind for love,” “an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry”
    • Line 78: “with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.”
    • Lines 79-80: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch!”
    • Line 82: “Moloch the vast stone of war!”
    • Line 83: “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!”
    • Line 84: “Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!,” “Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!”
    • Line 85: “Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius!,” “a cloud of sexless hydrogen”
    • Line 88: “Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations!,” “granite cocks!”
    • Lines 90-91: “Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! / Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”
    • Line 92: “crucifixions,” “down on the rocks of Time!”
    • Line 101: “where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses”
    • Line 102: “where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica”
    • Line 104: “you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss”
    • Line 105: “where you bang on the catatonic piano”
    • Line 106: “where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void”
    • Line 107: “the fascist national Golgotha”
    • Line 108: “resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb”
    • Line 110: “where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep”

  • Irony

    

    

    

    

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    Where irony appears in the poem:

    • Line 26: “who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,”
    • Line 34: “who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,”
    • Line 51: “who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,”
    • Line 54: “who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,”
    • Line 63: “who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz”
    • Line 65: “who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,”
    • Line 68: “who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,”
    • Line 85: “Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!”
    • Line 91: “Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”
    • Lines 97-98: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you laugh at this invisible humor”
    • Lines 99-99: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”

  • Allusion

    

    

    

    

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    Where allusion appears in the poem:

    • Before Line 1: “For Carl Solomon,” “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”
    • Line 5: “Mohammedan angels”
    • Line 6: “hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy”
    • Line 17: “a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists”
    • Line 19: “meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement”
    • Line 20: “who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey”
    • Line 24: “who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah”
    • Line 29: “the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago”
    • Line 40: “the three old shrews of fate,” “the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom”
    • Line 43: “N.C., secret hero of these poems”
    • Line 46: “& their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion”
    • Line 58: “phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz”
    • Line 59: “Birmingham jazz incarnation”
    • Line 64: “Rocky Mount to tender Buddha,” “Harvard to Narcissus”
    • Line 66: “who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism”
    • Line 72: “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—”
    • Line 74: “and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus”
    • Line 76: “the madman bum and angel beat in Time”
    • Line 77: “an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry”
    • Lines 79-89: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! / Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! / Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! / Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! / Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! / Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! / Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! / Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! / Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! / They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!”
    • Line 92: “flips and crucifixions!”
    • Line 94: “Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland”
    • Line 103: “the harpies of the Bronx”
    • Lines 107-109: “I’m with you in Rockland /    where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha / I’m with you in Rockland /    where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb / I’m with you in Rockland /    where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale”
    • Line 112: “in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America”

  • Hyperbole

    

    

    

    

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    Where hyperbole appears in the poem:

    • Line 4: “sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities”
    • Lines 10-11: “or purgatoried their torsos night after night / with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,”
    • Line 12: “incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,”
    • Line 14: “who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx”
    • Line 15: “listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,”
    • Line 17: “a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,”
    • Lines 19-20: “whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, / who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey”
    • Line 28: “and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task,”
    • Line 32: “who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down,”
    • Line 37: “those human seraphim, the sailors,”
    • Line 38: “scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,”
    • Line 41: “and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,”
    • Line 42: “who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise,”
    • Line 43: “joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls”
    • Line 54: “& alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,”
    • Line 56: “who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,”
    • Line 61: “& now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,”
    • Line 63: “waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads”
    • Line 70: “bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,”
    • Line 74: “who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus”
    • Line 75: “the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,”
    • Line 78: “with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.”
    • Line 108: “   where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb”
    • Line 109: “   where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale”

  • Rhetorical Question

    

    

    

    

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    Where rhetorical question appears in the poem:

    • Line 79: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”

• “Howl” Vocabulary

  Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

  • Carl Solomon
  • Madness/Mad/Madder
  • Hysterical
  • Fix
  • Negro streets
  • Angelheaded
  • Dynamo
  • Cold-water flats
  • The El
  • Mohammedan
  • Tenement
  • Illuminated/Illuminating/Illuminations/Illuminates
  • Blake-light
  • Odes
  • Unshaven
  • The Terror
  • Pubic beards
  • Busted
  • Laredo
  • Paint hotels
  • Paradise Alley
  • Turpentine
  • Purgatoried
  • Paterson
  • Peyote solidities
  • Teahead
  • Boroughs
  • Ashcan
  • Benzedrine
  • Bronx
  • Battery
  • Mouth-wracked
  • Drear
  • Submarine
  • Bickford's
  • Fugazzi's
  • Hydrogen jukebox
  • Bellevue
  • Battalion
  • Platonic
  • Empire State
  • Yacketayakking
  • Eyeball kicks
  • Disgorged
  • Meat for the Synagogue
  • Zen
  • Atlantic City Hall
  • Junk-withdrawal
  • Eastern sweats/Tangerian bone-grindings/Migraines of China
  • Newark's
  • Boxcars
  • Grandfather night
  • Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross
  • Bop kabbalah
  • Loned it
  • Indian angels
  • Dungarees
  • Pacifist
  • Capitalism
  • Narcotic
  • Supercommunist
  • Union Square
  • Los Alamos
  • Wall
  • Staten Island ferry
  • Pederasty
  • Seraphim
  • Balled
  • Turkish Bath
  • Shrews of fate
  • Loveboys
  • Loom
  • Copulated
  • Insatiate
  • Gyzym
  • Snatch
  • Myriad
  • Cocksman and Adonis
  • Solipsisms
  • Johns
  • Sordid
  • Tokay
  • Third Avenue
  • East River
  • Opium
  • Hudson
  • Floodlight
  • Laurel
  • Bowery
  • Pushcarts
  • Harpsichords
  • Harlem
  • Tubercular
  • Orange crates of theology
  • Incantations
  • Borsht
  • Leaden verse
  • Regiments
  • Tanked-up
  • Fairies of advertising
  • Nitroglycerine
  • Mustard gas
  • Chinatown
  • Passaic
  • Phonograph
  • Steamwhistles
  • Jail-solitude
  • Hotrod-Golgotha
  • Birmingham
  • Incarnation/Incarnate/Reincarnate
  • In vain
  • Salvation
  • Alcatraz
  • Rocky Mount
  • Tangiers
  • Southern Pacific
  • Narcissus
  • Woodlawn
  • Daisychain
  • Sanity trials
  • Hung jury
  • CCNY
  • Dadaism
  • Harlequin
  • Instantaneous lobotomy
  • Pingpong
  • Amnesia
  • Insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy
  • Catatonia/Catatonic
  • Madtowns
  • Foetid
  • Pilgrim State, Rockland, Greystone
  • Solitude-bench
  • Dolmen-realms
  • ******
  • Fantastic
  • Alchemy
  • Ellipsis
  • Vibrating plane
  • Catalogue
  • Variable measure
  • Juxtaposed
  • Archangel
  • Elemental
  • Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
  • Syntax and measure
  • Beat
  • Goldhorn
  • Eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani
  • Sphinx
  • Moloch
  • Crossbone
  • Jehovahs
  • Specter/Spectral
  • Sexless hydrogen
  • Treasuries
  • Invincible
  • Adorations
  • Crucifixions
  • Epiphanies
  • Highs
  • Shade
  • Faculties
  • Spinsters
  • Utica
  • Harpies
  • Straightjacket
  • The Abyss
  • Ungodly
  • Shocks
  • Pilgrimage
  • Fascist national Golgotha
  • Hebrew socialist revolution
  • Comrades
  • The Internationale
  • Legions
  • Sea-journey
  • (Location in poem: Before Line 1: “For Carl Solomon”; Line 72: “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—”; Line 94: “Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland”)

• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Howl”

  • Form

  • Meter

  • Rhyme Scheme

• “Howl” Speaker

• “Howl” Setting

• Literary and Historical Context of “Howl”

• More “Howl” Resources

  • External Resources

    • The Poem Out Loud — Listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" live in 1959.

    • The Poet's Life and Work — Read a biography of Ginsberg at the Poetry Foundation.

    • The Impact of "Howl" — A 2010 retrospective on "How 'Howl' Changed the World."

    • "Howl" and Censorship — More context on the controversy surrounding the taboo-breaking publication of "Howl."

    • An Interview with the Poet — Watch Conan O'Brien interviewing Ginsberg in 1994.

    • An Introduction to the Beats — Read "A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets," courtesy of Poets.org.

  • LitCharts on Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg

    • A Supermarket in California

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