American Literature

The world of Allen Ginsbergs  Howl  is equal parts vibrant and bleak. The world he represents is not clear-cut but an amalgamation of drugs, sex, madness, desperation, celebration, and individuality. The last is perhaps the most important, as it is a unifying factor in the modern experience of self and the world. Through the poem, he seems to be seeking a way in which to portray the new ideas of culture, art, and life that he sees embodied within mans experience of the world. Ginsbergs world, as presented in  Howl,  is peopled with madness, drugs, music, and a kind of mysticism. In many respects, when one looks beyond the strength of the imagery in such phrases  reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band  (ll.77), there is a concrete world beneath.

There is no doubt that Ginsberg employs the use of hyperbole but only as a way to give new truth and depth to old concepts of society, art, and culture as whole.  Howl,  can be tied into the post-modern ideas of combined fiction, realism, multiculturalism, and experimentation through the combined non-fictional (autobiographical) elements of Ginsbergs personal life with an awareness of changing and expanding cultural ideas as represented by post-World War II society and culture, which create a new perspective on humanity. By representing his own friends and world through this series of complex imagery, Ginsberg seems to be attempting to mythologize the world in order to make it more real. Jack Kerouac, Carl Solomon, even Ginsberg himself becomes a product of experience and, more importantly, the interpretation of experience. Ginsberg shows through his unique, free flowing form the necessity of re-ordering the world within the context of the contemporary awareness of the world.