Allen Ginsberg's Confrontation With Moloch

6. What is Allen Ginsberg’s confrontation with Moloch in the second section of “Howl” about?

In the second section of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” Ginsberg provokes the Biblical false idol Moloch, repeating “Moloch!” in an accusatory tone. To understand the context, the reader has to recall the first section of the poem. In it, Ginsberg laments the loss of the “best minds” of his generation. Naturally, the reader would come to ask what happened to these people/what was it that destroyed them? In the second section, Ginsberg answers that question with Moloch. Moloch isn’t necessarily the same being as he is in the Bible, but that Ginsberg used that specific name out of all possible Biblical references is something to note. Like the old Moloch, this

It transitions to the speaker shaping an axe handle into a hatchet handle for Kai. Doing this triggers a memory of infamous Modernist poet, Ezra Pound. Pound tells Snyder, “When making an axe handle / the pattern is not far off.” The speaker begins to give Kai similar advice (“We'll shape the handle / By checking the handle/ Of the axe we cut with--) but then he remembers extremely similar advice from 4th century Chinese essayist Lu Ji, “In making the handle / Of an axe / By cutting wood with an axe / The model is indeed near at hand”. The meaning of the poem becomes clearer in the final lines, “I am an axe / And my son a handle, soon / To be shaping again, model / And tool, craft of culture, / How we go on”. Snyder is remarking on the masculine cycle of teaching and being taught. Despite being separated by thousands of years, this cycle allows Pound to give the same advice as Lu—and like the both of them, Snyder is a tool and a model, a “craft of culture” that is a part of the endless cycle of shaping the next

Outside of the completely abstract, it’s impossible to determine what percentage of any piece of the poem is telling a truth relative to Carson’s life. For example, “Well there are many ways of being held prisoner, / I am thinking as I stride over the moor. / As a rule after lunch mother has a nap,” what makes “The Glass Essay” great instead, is how Carson is able to brilliantly create a feeling and a circumstance that makes the reader question how much of the confessional aspects of the poem may actually be projection. Carson takes a universal truth (everyone has felt imprisoned before), a literary reference (the “moor” in question is almost undoubtedly connected to the gothic atmosphere of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights) and a small detail that ties the first three lines all together in a way that is both personal and relatable. Most of the poem follows a similar format, though not always in that order (“which now plunges towards me over the moor. / When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die. / This is not uncommon.) Here it’s a continuation of the literary reference (sometimes it’s replaced by a metaphor), then the private yet relatable memory, and the finally the universal truth to connect it together. If “The Glass Essay” is a confessional poem, then it’s a confession that goes beyond