Allen Ginsberg's Beat Movement

Allen Ginsberg is considered a father figure of the 1950s beat movement, a movement started by those who felt beaten down and oppressed, with Ginsberg expressing many of the movement’s ideals throughout his life and through his writing. He was born in 1926, into a New Jersey household that embraced poetry, literature, and philosophy. His father was a poet and a schoolteacher, and his mother was a Russian immigrant who spent many years in mental hospitals leading up to her death. In 1949, Ginsberg was involved in a robbery that would have led to jail time if he did not plead insanity and spend time in Columbia University’s mental health facilities (Baym and Levine 1354-1356), and this experience inspired his literature.
“Howl” is composed of

With the aftermath of the war, there was a struggle to reclaim the power that had been lost throughout the war. For many, the ideals and mindset of the beat generation were a good fit for their need for change. Ginsberg became an even bigger anti-war protestor throughout the Vietnam War, going as far as getting arrested for demonstrating outside the Rockwell Corporation nuclear trigger factory over the cause (Reynolds). His efforts, as well as the efforts of the entire beat movement, led towards creating a greater freedom for all, towards a more expressive culture that people today experience in the United States and other progressive

Ginsberg explores how the generation felt oppressed, and he describes the great unruly god “Moloch” to whom people would offer up their sacrifices. The different methods they had to release and forget their feelings at the time were drugs, smoking, sex, and travel. By exploring and transcending, they were able to distance themselves from the toxic culture surrounding them. The poem tested the limits of what society was willing to accept at the time, but ultimately led to a better freedom for writers. Upon the surface, the reader may see “Howl” as obscene, but it was purely an honest expression of the true feelings that those involved in the movement wanted to express. While the average text is not as controversial as “Howl,” the poem opened the door to a different future in literature, where people published more freely, sang more freely, and created more freely. Now, books such as Fifty Shades of Gray, which would have been deemed obscene in the 1950s, can be found on any bookstore shelf alongside classic works of American