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lack of decorum of any kind in his dreadful little volume. I believe
that the title of his long poem, "Howl," is meant to be a noun, but I
can't help taking it as an imperative. The poem itself is a confession
of the poet's faith, done into some 112 paragraph-like lines, in the rav–
ings of a lunatic friend (to whom it is dedicated), and in the irregulari–
ties in the lives of those of his friends who populate his rather disturbed
pantheon. Here is the poem's beginning:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
lry
madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for
an angry fix,
angelheaded 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,
who bared their brains to Heav en under the El and saw Mohammedan
angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool 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
...
This continues, sponging on one's toleration, for pages and pages. A
kind of climax was reached for me, in a long section of screams about
"Moloch!", at a rare point of self-referential lucidity: "Dreams! adora–
tions! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!"
Howl
seems to have emerged under the influence of a kind of literary
Festspiel
held at frequent intervals on the West Coast, in the course
of which various poets, "with radiant cool eyes," undoubtedly, read
their works before audiences of writhing and adoring youths. "Howl"
and the other longer poems in this book, including "America," "Sun–
flower Sutra," "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound" and some dismal
pastiches of William Carlos Williams (who wrote a brief reminiscence
of the poet to introduce this volume) , all proclaim, in a hopped-up
and improvised tone, that nothing seems to be worth saying save in
a hopped-up and improvised tone. There are also avowed post-Poundian
pacts with Walt Whitman and Apollinaire, and perhaps an unacknowl–
edged one with Lautn!amont. I don't know; Mr. Ginsberg prefaces
Howl
with a long dedication to some of his fellow-writers that reads
just like his poems ("To ... William Seward Burroughs, author of
