form, personified in the child-eating malevolent
god Moloch. It is a cliche ́of politicians that chil-
dren are a society’s future, but Ginsberg brings the
cliche ́ to life in this shocking symbol of innocent
children willfully sacrificed in exchange for power.
These elements, as well as fitting into the
transcendentalist tradition, are also characteristic
of visionary poetry in the tradition of Ginsberg’s
spiritual mentor William Blake. Visionary poetry
expresses spiritual landscapes discovered through
inner journeys undertaken through intuition,
meditation, dreams, and psychedelic drugs.
The hipsters’ vision of reality is differenti-
ated from the ‘‘straight’’ vision of reality in part
by attitudes toward time. The theme of time
permeates all parts of the poem, simultaneously
pointing to the importance of the theme and
lending this disparate poem some unity. The
poem implies that straight society is governed
by time constraints represented by material
clocks and watches. This time is seen as antithet-
ical to spiritual values. The hipsters obey only
eternal time, the clocks in space of the ‘‘Foot-
note’’ (line 12). Thus in part I, line 54, they throw
their watches off the roof to cast their vote for
eternity, which exists outside of time. The ges-
ture is heroic yet futile, as alarm clocks fall on
their heads every day for the next ten years,
implying, perhaps, that the hipsters are forced
to conform and get conventional jobs in order to
survive. At this point in the poem, Moloch is
winning the battle between the sacred and the
profane, yet the hipsters continue to hurl them-
selves headlong into the fray, sustained by their
knowledge of the rightness of their passion.
The spiritual content of Ginsberg’s poem is
reflected in its form. It does not have rhyme or
regular meter but is arranged in long lines in the
style of Walt Whitman. In ‘‘Notes Written on
Finally Recording ‘Howl,’’’ Ginsberg calls his
lines ‘‘bardic breath.’’ Both elements in this
phrase—bard and breath—can be analyzed in
order to throw light on ‘‘Howl.’’
A bard is a reciter of poetry from the ancient
oral traditions in which poetry was not written
down but passed down through the generations
from bard to bard. ‘‘Howl’’ is certainly a poem
that demands to be read aloud, and it is fitting
that its first public appearance was not as a
written publication but as a reading. The experi-
ence of hearing these long lines read aloud is of a
cascade of words and phrases tumbling over one
another in an outpouring of passion, as befits
spontaneous expression. This effect is reinforced
by the fact that the whole of part I of the poem is
one 78-line sentence. The poem is given a unity
and coherence by the repetition of the wordwho
at the beginning of most of these lines.
Ginsberg explains in his ‘‘Notes Written on
Finally Recording ‘Howl’’’ that he intends each
line of the poem to be spoken as a single breath
unit. This mode of organizing his verse may stem
from his interest in Eastern religions, which
emphasize control over the breath as a way of
quieting the mind and increasing subjective aware-
ness of the individual’s eternal nature that exists
beyond time and change. Later in life, Ginsberg
was to practiceshamatha, a form of Buddhist
breath meditation that he learned from his Tibe-
tan teacher, Cho ̈gyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Gins-
berg’s book Mind Breaths: Poems, 1972–1977
(1977), dedicated to Trungpa, contains poems
written with the help ofshamathameditation.
Ginsberg’s repetition of the word ‘‘who’’ at
the beginning of his lines in part I and his repe-
tition of the word ‘‘holy’’ in the ‘‘Footnote’’ are
examples of a rhetorical device known asana-
phora.Anaphora is a literary device whereby
certain words are emphasized through their rep-
etition at the beginnings of clauses or lines. In
this poem, the repetitions reflect the use of a
mantra in meditation. The mantra is a sound
that is repeated in order to quiet the mind in a
similar way to the breath control inshamatha
meditation. In the case of the wordholy, the
meaning of the word reflects the intended spiri-
tual effects of the mantra-style repetition. Gins-
berg’s use of repeated words in a mantra-like
way combines with his use of the single-line
breath unit to lend his poem an incantatory
spiritual power that is calculated to alter the
awareness of the poet-bard and the listener
alike. This appears to have happened at the
first reading of ‘‘Howl,’’ when, according to
Barry Miles’sGinsberg: A Biography, ‘‘Allen
was completely transported,’’ while the audience
was ‘‘cheering him wildly at every line.’’
In choosing the wordholyfor his anaphoric
pattern, Ginsberg is consciously echoing the
final line of William Blake’sThe Marriage of
Heaven and Hell. In the section ‘‘A Song of Lib-
erty,’’ after castigating religious hypocrites for
claiming that the failure to act on their desires
is a virtuous virginity, Blake concludes with the
statement that every living thing is holy. Gins-
berg, in the ‘‘Footnote,’’ makes the same pointHowl