In their wanderings around New York, the
hipsters talk of hospitals, jails, and wars, the
destructive institutions of straight society. Line 20
refers to post-college career failures who suffer the
tortures of drug withdrawal.
LINES 23–33
The post-college career failures stow away in
the boxcars of trains on nighttime journeys to
their families’ farms. Inspired by spiritual expe-
rience, they study mystical authors and psychic
phenomena and set out on vision quests to
resolve their crises. Lines 27 to 33 describe the
fates of people in Ginsberg’s circle: some, hungry
and lonely, wander through Houston, seeking
jazz, sex, or mere sustenance. Others vanish in
the wilds of Mexico or, driven by pacifist con-
victions, launch investigations into the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, which they consider to
be a tool of repression.
Some hipsters distribute Communist leaf-
lets. Los Alamos is the U.S. government labora-
tory in New Mexico where the atomic bomb was
developed. Protestors (line 32) are pursued by
police who are trying to suppress their antiwar
activities. The reference to naked victims implies
that protestors are interrogated and tortured by
a repressive state.
LINES 34–44
Line 34 describes protestors who are arrested
but fight back by attacking police. Ginsberg insists
that these hipsters have committed no crimes but
indulgence in homosexual and drug-related adven-
tures. Line 40 laments the loss of homosexual
lovers to conventional heterosexual relationships,
married respectability,and mainstream careers.
These fates are seen as hostile to creativity.
LINES 45–55
This section describes people walking all
night to reach an opium den. Others make suicide
attempts on the banks of the Hudson River. Lines
48 to 52 salute the homeless and dispossessed
people who sit in boxes under a bridge, suffer
from tuberculosis in Harlem apartments, and
adapt crates as furniture. One person, desperate
for food, plunges under a meat truck in pursuit of
an egg.
Hipsters throw their watches off the roof as
an act of protest against the straight world of
time constraints: they ally themselves with
timelessness and eternity. These actions are
futile, however, as they are condemned to be
woken by an alarm clock each day, presumably
to get to a job forced upon them by straight
society.LINES 56–66
This section salutes those innocents who
have been destroyed by the prevailing poor
taste in literature and the demands of consumer-
ism. A would-be suicide jumps off Brooklyn
Bridge but miraculously lives to walk away into
the oblivion of Chinatown. Lines 58 through 62
chronicle wild, drunken escapades, including
dancing barefoot on broken wineglasses and
driving cross-country to talk to a friend about a
vision of eternity. Hipsters pray for each other’s
souls in cathedrals, but the cathedrals seem
devoid of hope, suggesting the spiritual bank-
ruptcy of organized religion.
Line 63 describes jail visits, perhaps to Gins-
berg’s acquaintances who were imprisoned for drug
offenses, robberies, or homosexual acts. Line 64
refers to William Burroughs, who (according to
Ginsberg’s annotation to the facsimile edition of
‘‘Howl’’) retired to Mexico and to Tangiers,
Morocco. There is also a reference to Jack Kerouac,
who retired to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and
who followed Buddhist teachings. The hypnotic
power of the radio in line 65 alludes to Naomi
Ginsberg’s paranoid belief that doctors had
implanted radio receivers in her body through
which she received messages. The mention of sanity
trials is possibly an oblique satirical comment on
obscenity trials, which were a tool of the political
establishment against rebels such as the Beats.
Obscenity trials, Ginsberg suggests, should be
abandoned in favor of sanity trials in which the
establishment would stand accused of insanity.
Line 66 (according to Ginsberg’s annotated
edition) refers to an incident in which Carl Solo-
mon threw potato salad at a college lecturer as a
Dadaist statement. (Dadaism is a branch of the
artistic movement of surrealism.) Solomon sub-
sequently turned up at a psychiatric institution
requesting a lobotomy.LINES 67–78
Ginsberg describes Carl Solomon being
given psychiatric therapies, including electric
shock treatment, and overturning a Ping-Pong
table in protest. Rockland refers to RocklandHowl