Picture Howl William Ginsberg Meaning

“I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.” Allen Ginsberg’s famous quote is one that inspires the continued analysis and explication of poetry. Ginsberg dedicated Howl to Carl Solomon, a writer he met during the eight months he spent at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. Ginsberg had been deeply disturbed to learn that Solomon had undergone shock therapy to treat his depression (source). Ginsberg believed that madness was often mistakenly used by middle class society to explain genius or brilliance. Ginsberg, a young, gay Jewish man was raised by a mentally ill mother, which ended up having a pretty big influence on his social philosophies – clearly, modern life drove people mad. Howl is a raw, aggressive, painful, sad shout directed at the culture that Ginsberg believed had destroyed many of his best friends and family. The poem reads like a shot of adrenaline straight into the listener’s bloodstream. Through his use of wordplay, imagery and tone, Ginsberg demonstrates the loss of freedom in American Society’s ever-confining reality. Picture Howl as the story of one man who barks at the moon to warn post-war America that trouble is brewing.
Ginsberg does a lot of his barking with intentional and clever wordplay throughout the poem. The poem itself is presented in three distinctive
Matt Djos wrote to this point that,“In presenting Solomon… Ginsberg tries to acknowledge the full discordance of modern life, the deterioration of self, and the ambiguity and complexity of feeling.” The confinement that was affecting Solomon was leading to his deterioration as a man, much like Ginsberg saw as the deterioration of society