Social Issues Connected To “Howl”
Ginsberg’s literary life managed to prove him to be the most socially aware poet. His state of ecstasy rendered him to envision across the fog of injustice that his country was invalidating and crushing individual liberty. He did stand for love, liberation, and individualism when the social system, culture, and politics intended to suppress personal freedom. His poem was an instance of rising and facing any kind of oppression that community or administration is inflicting without fear or empathy to achieve clarity and thus contentment.
Howl was indeed activism against all oppression and subordination within the community. Across the poem, Ginsberg asks the audience to cry out against the capitalist system, mistreatment, suppression and subservience. Ginsberg opens the poem with assertive statements and visual imagery to reveal the insanity of the individuals who are being suppressed and wrecked by the American culture. Starting from the beginning of the poem, he explains about how the “best minds” of his generation are getting damaged by the insanity and psychological deterioration of people desperate to fit into the normality of the society. He writes, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness/starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for/an angry fix” (Ginsberg, part I. lines 1-4). This line is exquisite yet deeply moving at the very same time because of the truth in it. It expresses a graphic outline of the daily lives of different groups of people in Ginsberg’s world; from mentally ill people to drug abusers and homosexual people. From this poem, Ginsberg was able to demonstrate the status of American culture at that time, where obscenity laws condemned homosexual sexual relations in all fifty states of America, and how individuals were repressed with aspirations, anxieties, and insanity, quietly seeking and begging for help.