Howling in Pain

There’s a silence after every chaos. There’s a calm that lingers for a period of time, a blank. Silence that makes one feel hollow and howl in pain. In HOWL, Allen Ginsberg illustrates his and his companions, the Beats’ experiences during the 1950’s. HOWL is broken down into three different parts that each depict different emotions. Ginsberg has been to different places that it seems like he is trying to escape, or looking for a place that will dissipate the feeling of loneliness. He has a tendency to travel to many different places but he always ends up coming back to himself.
After the chaos that is World War II that rattled America, changes started to flower into society. During the post­war in the U.S, new poetry styles …show more content…
par.1). The themes of alcoholism, drugs, poverty, and jazz can be found in Howl as they are part of the cultural movement in the 1950’s.
In Part One of the poem, Ginsberg has a tone of wonderment. This part of the poem mostly illustrates his travels with “the who”, which is the Beat or as he put it “ the best minds” of his generation (line 1). Ginsberg was very observant to his surroundings and took in great details and described them in an abstract fashion. In the city of New York, he takes note of its poor street conditions as “poverty and tatters and hollow eyed” (Line 4). He is a person that is sensitive to others pain that he had observed “the who” to be crying, screaming, and wandered in broken hearts. As a citizen of that that time, Ginsberg can see himself in the people he sees. Also, the words that were used in this poem connects with the tone as Ginsberg beautifies words in a poetic manner that makes it spoken in a loving way just like in line 3 he states “ angelheaded hipsters”, as if they were heaven sent. His word choice such as “machinery of the night” (line 3) to describe the machines in the city that never sleeps. His style of diction creates an imagery that makes the reader think in his eccentric …show more content…
He seems to travel to a place twice, one in his physical form and one in his mental thoughts. He names a few places like “Canada & Paterson” (line 12), “Brooklyn Bridge” (line 16), “Mexico..Chicago” (line 29), and many others. It was known that he had travelled widely in places like Cuba, India, Czech, and China (Ginsberg, Allen. par.2) He compares travel and time with “lightning in the mind leaping towards poles” (line 12). Its impressive to realize that with the mind, one can travel in a matter of seconds. Ginsberg has traveled so much that one may think that he is running away. During the difficult time in the post­war people were still