In Howl, Allen Ginsberg’s use of repetition, rhythmic syntax, obscenity, and biblical parallelism constructs a heroic identity for the homosexual outsider while exposing the contradictions inherent in that construction. By drawing on the cultural symbols through which American identity is traditionally idealized, Ginsberg reveals how the performance of sexual rebellion can become entangled with the dominant ideology it seeks to resist. The poem’s stylistic tension between transgression and conformity ultimately complicates its vision of sexual liberation.
In an interview, Ginsberg describes his approach to writing Howl as one that depends on breath:
“Inspiration …. a feeling of heightened breath or slightly exalted breath, when the body feels like a hollow reed in the wind of breath …. a kind of inspiration, a kind of breathing that is in ‘Howl’ …. a question of quality of your attention to your own mind and your own thoughts” (Pacernick).
This description suggests that readers should understand Ginsberg’s narrative as informed by an ongoing tension between resistance and conformity. His embodied approach to language, however, can also be deceptive: the apparent spontaneity of his poetic expression conceals a complex relationship between individual rebellion and the cultural conventions against which that rebellion is directed.
On the surface, the purpose of Howl appears straightforward: the poem protests the pursuit of wealth and material success in mainstream America while exposing the entanglements of sexuality, popular culture, and American identity. Its narrative perspective invites readers to share in the narrator’s frustration as he attempts to confess his sexual identity while confronting the expectations of the American heroic archetype: the rebel. The heroes of Howl emerge as sexual outcasts whose experiences are characterized by explicit expressions of desire, pleasure, and emotional suffering. Ginsberg writes:
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphims, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond and naked angel came to pierce them with a sword (Ginsberg).
This passage illustrates Ginsberg’s unconventional grammar and punctuation, as well as the collective, accumulative movement of his poetic syntax. The repeated use of “who” creates a rhythmic structure that gathers individual experiences into a collective narrative of marginalization and desire. Moreover, Ginsberg’s uncensored language reinforces the breath-driven style he describes in his interview. By attributing saintliness to sexual rebels, he offers a model of resistance while establishing a structural identification between these figures and his own poetic position. They constitute a community defined by its difference from mainstream society, yet their marginalization also becomes the source of their heroic status.
Ginsberg suggests that the American hero can be reimagined through figures such as the “saintly motorcyclists,” who challenge dominant sexual conventions through the expression of queer desire, evoked in the phrase “caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love.” Yet the emotional intensity of this challenge is complicated by the poem’s use of overstatement and its appropriation of established cultural symbols. The association of sexual rebels with saints and angels creates a tension between transgression and sanctification: the figures who violate social conventions are simultaneously elevated through familiar religious imagery. This tension contributes to the dramatic complexity of the narrator’s self-consciousness, complicating the poem’s presentation of subjective disobedience.
If sexual liberation constitutes a protest against dominant taboos, then the use of culturally established models of perfection raises questions about the sincerity and independence of that protest. The nonconformist character of the Beats is therefore essential to understanding Ginsberg’s style and its relationship to both resistance and tradition. As Nick Selby argues, “The Beats remind us of the value of free speech as a weapon against taboos: of the force of culture itself in the struggle against social, political, psychic, and cultural constrictions …. their language must become our vision” (Selby). Ginsberg is interested in representing sexual liberation as being in direct conflict with a heteronormative society. In his interview, he declares, “While you are not safe, I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time” (Ginsberg). This statement suggests that the transgression of sexual taboos destabilizes the broader cultural ideal of American unity by deliberately asserting a queer identity. Sexual liberation thus becomes more than an individual act of defiance: it exposes the instability of the social order that seeks to contain it.
Ginsberg’s ethical conflict becomes more apparent when he confronts the ambivalence inherent in embracing the role of the sexual rebel while remaining subject to the influence of mainstream American culture. For example, Ginsberg writes:
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time and Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate syntax and measure poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head (Ginsberg).
Within this passage, the figurative language, unconventional sentence structure, and spiritual allusions introduce a moral question that Ginsberg’s poem does not definitively resolve: How can one resist the dominant culture without assimilating marginal identities into its established frameworks? Ginsberg’s language, charged with obscenity and religious imagery, produces an ironic juxtaposition between sexual transgression and spiritual aspiration. The reader is consequently confronted with the tension between confession as an act of liberation and confession as a possible means of reproducing the very cultural conditions from which liberation is sought. The poem thereby becomes a narrative of subjective, self-conscious, and potentially self-defeating disobedience.
Ginsberg’s attempt to negotiate his position as both a consumer and a product of mainstream American culture reveals a deeply ambivalent understanding of assimilation. His poetic identification with oppositional sexuality exposes the difficulty of maintaining a position of resistance within a culture capable of incorporating its own dissenters. Ginsberg, the Beats, and homosexuals can all be understood as oppositional heroes who challenge a dominant system of secrecy and suspicion. Yet the figure of the outsider is complicated by the possibility that marginal identities may be absorbed into mainstream ideology. Their status as outsiders can become a source of cultural distinction and even popular appeal, allowing the dominant culture to accommodate the very opposition that initially threatened it. In this sense, the celebration of oppositional sexuality risks redefining and ultimately reproducing the cultural structures it seeks to resist.
Ginsberg’s account of Howl in his interview further illuminates this tension between innovation and tradition:
“If you’ll notice, its done in the parallelisms of the Bible. And my [Allen Ginsberg] own verse line is drawn from that” (Pacernick).
The poem’s biblical parallelisms place Ginsberg within a literary and religious tradition even as its subject matter challenges conventional sexual morality. This relationship complicates the poem’s oppositional stance, particularly when considered alongside the narrator’s difficulty in fully affirming his gay identity within the cultural frameworks available to him. Rather than simply celebrating sexual dissidence, Howl reveals the limitations of attempting to articulate liberation through inherited forms of authority. The resulting tension exposes a failure to reconcile America as an ideal with America as a lived reality (Selby).
The style of Howl is consequently shaped by the figure of a poetic hero who, after turning sustained attention toward his own mind and thoughts, becomes his own judge, jury, and executioner. The language of liberation becomes entangled with the mechanisms of self-judgment, suggesting that the pursuit of an authentic identity may reproduce the very forms of discipline from which the subject seeks to escape. As Selby observes, “The sexual rebel is now a popular hero squarely within the discourses of the mainstream, rather than at its margins” (Selby). The transformation of the sexual rebel into a popular hero encapsulates the central contradiction of Ginsberg’s poetic project: resistance may achieve cultural recognition only by becoming legible within the dominant culture.
Ultimately, Ginsberg’s style in Howl can be characterized by its deliberate grit of word choice and sentence structure, its extensive use of repetition and parallelism, its self-conscious relationship between author and reader, its appropriation of cultural models traditionally associated with American identity, and its calculated transgression of public conventions. These stylistic features produce a schism between Ginsberg as the romanticized sexual rebel and Ginsberg as the popular American hero. The resulting existential conflict reflects the poet’s heightened awareness of identity and of the cultural forces that constrain its expression. By dramatizing the relationship between sexual liberation and the assimilation of marginalized identities into the mainstream, Howl becomes a narrative that illuminates the possibility of self-defeat: the rebel’s struggle for liberation may ultimately contribute to the cultural order against which the rebellion is directed.
Works Cited
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl, and Other Poems. City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 1956.
Pacernick, Gary, and Allen Ginsberg. “Allen Ginsberg: An Interview.” First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 228–254. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1n2ttfc.21. Accessed 1 May 2022.
Selby, Nick. “Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’: Sexuality and Popular Heroism in 50s America.” Revue Française d’études Américaines, no. 68, 1996, pp. 62–70. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20874288. Accessed 1 May 2022.
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