Allen Ginsberg: "Howl" and "The Shrouded Stranger"

The entire second part is largely about Moloch, who was the Angel of Death, and came to take kill all of the first-born sons, according to Jewish belief. In ?Howl,? he makes many religious references. The running on paragraphs in ?Howl? heighten what Ginsberg is saying, and it creates a very intense, often angry feeling. It begins ?I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/angryheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,/who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz?? The poem goes on, every line beginning with ?Who?? and in turn, everything in it is about the ?best minds? of Ginsberg?s time.

The unique forms between the poems cause a contrast in mood. In ?The Shrouded Stranger,? this is achieved through mythological hints ? In one verse, Ginsberg makes himself out to be something resembling the Sphinx, a bird fabled to burn up and be reborn again once every 500 years.

?Howl? is a direct influence from hallucinatory drugs that Ginsberg took. Commas connect almost everything, in turn making the entire book-long poem only a few complete sentences, which conventionalists would call run-ons. ?Howl? is an epic about artists? struggles.

The format of ?Howl? is very unique, in that rather than taking on any kind of traditional poem structure, or anything even resembling one, it simply is formed by paragraph after paragraph. These are clearly the words of a very intoxicated Ginsberg. He is again desperate, this time for physical ability. ?Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and!

unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!/Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!? This is now the opposite of the desire to live in ?The Shrouded Stranger,? instead; it is describing the hopeless chaos of the world. ?Howl? achieves more of an intensity, and sparks a series of strong emotions, but it reads more like prose than poetry.

There are also allusions of spirituality in both poems.