capitalism causes members of a society to
develop. This dependence may be described as
a narcotic or sleep-inducing haze because it can
be argued that capitalism must keep people in an
unawakened, trancelike state in order to per-
suade them to consume more and maximize the
profits that drive the economy. There is an addi-
tional ironic and self-deprecatingly humorous
twist in the fact that many of the hipsters
who are protesting the capitalist abuses of the
tobacco industry are themselves addicted to
cigarettes.
Religious Imagery
Images of tortured, suffering, endangered, and
wounded bodies abound in the poem, for exam-
ple, in part I, lines 9, 10, 45, 53, 58, and 69, and
part III, line 11. This imagery reinforces the
notion that the hipsters are persecuted by
conventional society, lending them the aura of
martyrs. More specifically, some of the images of
suffering link the hipsters to Christ. Examples
include the images at part I, line 77, and part III,
line 13. The effect of invoking Christ is to lend
the hipsters his spiritual authority and status as
persecuted innocent. It is important to recall that
in his ‘‘Notes Written on Finally Recording
‘Howl,’’’ Ginsberg describes part I as ‘‘a lament
for the Lamb in America with instances of
remarkable lamblike youths,’’ with the Lamb
referring to Christ’s mercy and innocence.
Historical Context
The Beat Movement
Jack Kerouac is thought to have introduced the
term ‘‘Beat generation’’ around 1948. The term
is generally understood to describe a group of
American writers who reached prominence from
the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. Kerouac intro-
duced the term to John Clellon Holmes, who
published a novel about the Beat Generation,
Go, in 1952 and a manifesto in theNew York
Times Magazinetitled ‘‘This Is the Beat Gener-
ation’’ (published November 16, 1952).
The adjectivebeatis believed to have been
first used by Herbert Huncke to describe some-
one living roughly without money or prospects.
In its early usage,beatcame to mean beaten
down by conformist society, but Kerouac later
insisted that it had the positive connotations of
upbeat, beatific, and on the beat musically.
The Beats rejected post-World War II con-
ventional social values and embraced Eastern
philosophy and religion, drug use, free love,
interracial relationships, and nontraditional lit-
erary and artistic forms. They were critics of
materialism, consumerism, militarism, the cold
war, industrialization, mechanization, dehu-
manizing institutions such as prisons, hospitals
and psychiatric institutions, repressive morality,
and racial prejudice.
The Beat movement was a twentieth-century
expression of romanticism, being antiestablish-
ment and pro-self. Like earlier romantics, the
Beats emphasized the spontaneous expression
of the individual’s vital energies and the validity
of subjective experience in the search for truth.
They turned their backs on literary convention,
using experimental forms and informal styles
based on spontaneous speech or streams of con-
sciousness. In subject matter, too, they were reb-
els, drawing on their own adventurous lives and
the lives of people of the counterculture. It could
be argued that ‘‘Howl’’ was the first work to
bring Beat culture and values to the notice of
the general public. With its form based on spon-
taneous (if extraordinarily voluble) speech pat-
terns, its references to sexuality and drugs, and
its passionate and rebellious authorial stance,
the poem itself became a manifesto of the Beat
movement.The Cold War
The cold war was a period of tension and rivalry
between the United States and the Soviet Union
from the end of World War II in 1945 until the
early 1990s, when the Communist Soviet Union
collapsed. The period was characterized by mas-
sive military spending, the involvement of both
superpowers in proxy wars around the globe,
and a nuclear and conventional arms race. No
direct military action occurred between the
United States and the Soviet Union, which is
why the conflict was called the cold war. Never-
theless, many people in the United States and
Europe lived in fear of annihilation or devasta-
tion by a nuclear bomb, and the period saw
the rapid rise of antinuclear ‘‘ban the bomb’’
demonstrations.
A reference to the nuclear issue occurs in
‘‘Howl’’ in part I, line 15. The militarization of
the United States is referenced in part I, line 56,
where it is linked with atrocities wreaked upon
the innocent, consumerism, and the prevailingHowl