Since 1945: Short Answer Quiz

Allen Ginsberg, Howl


  1. It’s possible to think of the first part of Howl as one long, unwieldy, periodic sentence, in which the excessive amount of relative clauses (“who…”) creates a structural virtuosity in the poem to rival the lengths of the long rambling lines. Think about what you learn about the Beats in the first section, and then characterize the manner of presentation in this portion of the poem. Does it tell you more about Ginsberg, or his friends? How does it go about indicting the Fifties for what has happened to the Beats even before it names “Moloch” as their principle antagonist?

  1. Paraphrase what you take “Moloch” to signify in the poem’s second section. The name originally referred to the Canaanite fire god, but Ginsberg loads quite a bit of contemporary American society into the name. Examine the language in the following two lines, and then interpret who Moloch is: “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 smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! / Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!” (2581-82 [full ed.] 2598 [shorter ed.], ll. 81-85).

  1. The only mention of the word “howl” appears in the line 35, “who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts” and continues for the next five lines by providing explicit details of Ginsberg’s homosexuality. Assume that these lines are included for both obscenity and to reflect the audacity of the poem. Then, interpret what relationship they have to the poem as a whole, to the poem’s project of providing a memoir of the Beats, and to the indictment Ginsberg levels at the Fifties.

  1. Although Ginsberg is very interested in portraying homosexual experience in the poem, he is less kind to women (apart from his mother, whose plight he evokes memorably): “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 the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom” (2578 [full ed.] 2595 [shorter ed.]). Why does Ginsberg link female sexuality to the “heterosexual dollar,” and why should the “womb” be threatening or stultifying?

  1. “Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of a life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon” (2580 [full ed.] 2597 [shorter ed.]): much of Howl is devoted to mental illness and its consequences, including this passage from part one and the entirety of part three. Using the language of this line, describe how the poem renders the horrors of mental illness, and what Ginsberg means it to symbolize about contemporary American life.



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