Howl By Ginsberg Analysis

The powers if ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. Great changes’ are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power” (Wright 3).
History is something we all experience directly and indirectly. We live through it; it touches and shapes our lives. Sometimes it is not obvious, but more often it

There was a body of debate, and blind acceptance of our superiority based on the number of consumer goods we made, had access to, and used, was considered inhuman, undemocratic and suffocating. These mostly educated elite did not “buy” into the new mythology of free enterprise and its benefits. Allen Ginsberg, a poet from the 1950s, wrote of the American society and started his infamous poem Howl with: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked… who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed then down,… Moloch! Moloch! Robots apartments! Invisible suburbs! Skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! Invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!” (Ginsberg 9-19). These intellectuals felt far from liberated by American compulsion to consume and build arms, but were strangled by the over-powering expectations of the system. Into this intellectual stew came Ken Kesey who was one of the dissatisfied residents of the later half of the twentieth century. He was an all-American, white, middle-class boy, a high school wrestler champion, college student, and published author of the critically

“If you label it this, then it can’t be that… Kesey took great pains not to make his role explicit. He wasn’t the authority, somebody else was… He wasn’t the leader, he was the ‘non-navigator’” (Wolfe 126). He did buy into the consensus, and was not going to participate in it. First he moved to La Honda and lived with a core group of people, which expanded and contracted naturally as events occurred. The residents of La Honda experimented with drugs, which led them to experiment with lights, sounds, and perceptions. They followed their inclinations, and they lived for now, but what was now? Kesey and Wolfe never really said, but the closest Wolfe came to saying was: “To put it into so many words, to define it, was to limit it. If it’s this, then it can’t be that… Everyone had his own thing he was working out, but it all fit into the group thing, which was – “the Unspoken Thing”