TH E O TH ER S I D E
Allen Ginsberg � Howl BY ADAM WORSLEY ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLOTTE MCGLINCHEY
How does Allen Ginsberg’s Howl illuminate the principle themes and stylistic concerns of the Beat movement?
G
insberg described how his long-time friend and fellow Beat writer Jack Kerouac would drink heavily, lose his mind, and find himself thrown out of bars and beaten up in their alleyways; Ginsberg admitted that, stylistically at least, he “very definitely” owed a lot to Kerouac’s On The Road while he wrote Howl. Beat came to mean many different things to many different people. Kerouac understood the grand orchestra of universal reality as music; “everything is going to the beat – It’s the beat generation, it’s beat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like old-time low-down.” He coined the name ‘The Beat Generation’ after meeting Hunke, who simply told Kerouac he was feeling “beat”. The bloodshed caused by the world wars had beaten down world consciousness, and it struggled to understand the horrors which had taken place; the full impact of the German-ordered Holocaust and the American atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities Nagasaki and Hiroshima reached the limits of imagination. The Beat Generation wasn’t “a political or social rebellion” at its inception, but it certainly grew that way as the poets matured. Over the course of Ginsberg’s poem Howl, beat changes meaning from being beaten down to feeling beatific.
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