Analyzing Repetition in Ginsberg’s “Howl” | How Does This Reflect Today?
Qualities of the Beat Generation have seemingly repeated over multiple generations, similar to the way Beat Poets utilize repetition in their work. After analyzing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in Ann Charter’s The Portable Beat Reader, I noticed repetition in each stanza, and want to expand that to consider the way in which generational traits repeat. I want to compare similarites in forms of oppresstion between the Beat Generation and Generation Z.
Allen Ginsberg use of repetition in “Howl” to address Carl Solomon reveals the extreme emotion of watching someone’s descent into madness and suffering.
“I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void…” (Ginsberg 69)
With each line Ginsberg builds toward a tragic madness, evoking images of viewing Solomon suffering in Rockland under electric shock therapy. I felt the rage Ginsberg felt with the repetition of each horrifying explanation of his experience at Rockland.
My first initial thought reading the opening chapter, “Variations On A Generation” in The Portable Beat Reader by Ann Charters, was that my personal ideas and values are similar to those in the Beat Generation. As I progressed through this chapter I began to notice more similarities to Generation Z and current social issues.
“A few months after its publication, Howl and Other Poems, number four in the series, was seized by San Francisco customs officers. Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao, his employee at the City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, were charged with publishing and selling an obscene book” (Charters xxviii).
This instantly made me think of the recent string of banned books. The expression of controversial opinions and topics still seems to be widely unaccepted.
“As artists we were oppressed and indeed the people of the nation were oppressed… We knew we were poets and we had to speak out as poets. We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead — killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest” (Charters xxviii).
Ginsberg articulates the poets role here, suggesting that artists have a unique ability to speak out against oppression. This is often intimidating to society and specifically political figures. After reading this I was reminded of the decline in arts funding for schools. The decline leads me to believe that artist censorship and oppression is ongoing, and art education is becoming even more limited: it is being killed by “academies” and “disinterest.”
Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 62–71
