Howl of the Beat Generation - Assignment Example

Howl of the Beat generation The year is 1955 and a fretful and unpublished poet in his late 20s has a feeling that time is running out for him. He wants to be the greatest writer ever to have walked the face of the earth but fate has not been so kind. The poet Gary Snyder predicted that the night would be a “Poetik all bombshell” and sure enough, it was. On that night at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg read the poem Howl and it did stir mixed feelings among the public but one thing is for sure Allen had gotten the attention of the people. In the 1950s, the society was confined in following the social dogma without asking questions, many a things were considered taboo and they were supposed to remain so. The poem Howl is a poem that was screaming out in protest against a destructive and abusive society but the that is not how the society saw it then and for this the publisher and distributor of the book was arrested and charged with distribution of explicit and obscene material though they were pardoned after the poet Mark Schorer testified that “Ginsberg uses the rhythms of ordinary speech and diction and I would say that the poem uses necessarily the language of vulgarity.” From a glance Howl may appear as a random jumble of words or mere vomit on a page and that is what critics had done before but it can be seen the poet’s crazy rush is delicately controlled. The poet seems to be in a rush, the whole poem is tedious, and tiring to read yet it remains bearable. The whole poem expresses the need to break away from tradition. It does not keep the traditional meter and rhythm of a poem it is more of stream of consciousness writing and in this way, the poet was able to bring out his themes. Freedom is one of the things that the poet cries out for, He talks about personal freedom as well as freedom for the masses. The conformist society wants things done as per tradition. The poet talks from a homosexuals point of view and freely uses words that the society finds obscene and vulgar. The poet and his friends do a lot of travelling and one of the ways of breaking loose is by travelling. The mention of Moloch reminds the reader of the god of prisons governments and boring suburbia Madness is also a prominent theme in the poem. The title of the poem is Howl. Its more common for animals to howl than for human to do s. the opening of Howl starts by saying “I saw the very best of minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical nakedness.” In the poem, the people who society consider normal the poet finds to be insane. The society sees people as mentally ill but the poet sees them as misunderstood geniuses. Doctors and nurses who are normally seen as saviors are treated with suspicion while hallucinations are seen as divine signs. Rules and order are seen as a means of stunting creativity of a countries human resource. At the start of the poem he refers to all rebels as” the best minds of my generation.” He hails people who the society would consider ‘looser’ heroes. People, who jump of bridges, commit suicide, smuggle drugs, and engage in random public sex and plot revolutions. The poem focuses on change. Deteriorative change is the most discussed theme with a hint on how to bring about good change can be achieved. In the start of the poem, Ginsberg introduces the reader to his drug addicted friends showing the rate of their deterioration and addiction in the general society. The second part of the poem is on social divisions, the change discussed here is on treatment of different social classes. Ginsberg mentions that all the deterioration happens in front of passive observers eyes. The art work/design selected is a representation of the themes discussed by Ginsberg. It is a picture of a sunflower-looking object. The picture has many dull looking colors. A noticeable feature about the dull colors, however, is the shades that each one adjacent to the other progresses into. The picture has a dull yellowish color at the core. The yellowish color is followed by a grayish brown still dull color that is designed to look like petals on a flower. A quick glance at the picture brings a sunflower into mind. In the periphery of the flower is a dark grayish almost black shade of color. Within the blackish, dull, pebble looking color are bigger grey pebbles. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving historically naked, dragging themselves through Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” This the first line of the poem. Ginsberg describes how is once brilliant friends have grown dependent to drugs. They have changed into zombies who live for their next fix. Applying the art on Ginsberg friends, one can place the once brilliant minds at the core of the design, where though dull as it may seem, yellow is the brightest color in the design. These brilliant minds include bankers and middle-income earning people. The yellow fades into the brownish grey indicating the first stages of addiction that then progresses to the black and dark side that represents complete dependence on the drug. The large grey pebbles represent onlookers. In the second part of the poem, Ginsberg touches on oppression and inequality. He cites that the government looks upon the poor being oppressed by the rich. He says that the world has turned to a scenario where the rich get richer and the poor who happen to be the majority remain poorer (“who were expelled from the academics for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the window of the school”). Ginsberg was an openly gay man living at a time when gayism was still a social norm. He seems to hail people that are on the verge of fighting all injustices in the society. Using the design to represent the above theme, it can be concluded that the yellow part represents the rich and wealthy that thrive at the expense of others. The brownish part following it is the government and the supporters of the rich getting richer propaganda. The brownish part is between the yellow and black, dark part to show how the supporters of the rich act as obstacles to the justice that the poor crave for. In the black, dark part are the poor people living in the dark waiting for some light to be shed upon them. The dark color can be used to represent suffering and oppression. Since Ginsberg was an activist, the large grey pebbles could represent activists marching toward the core to destroy it and claim justice for all. “Howls” is without a doubt a strong poem with numerous themes as discussed previously in the first part. The design is a perception of what one would like it to represent in comparison to the poem. Work Cited Ginsberg, Allen. American masters Web. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/Ginsberg_a.html Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381 Read More