Language and style

When discussing poems like “HOWL” by Allen Ginsberg, it is important to pay attention to the language and the style used, as they can enhance your understanding of the text.

Playing with the language

In “HOWL”, the poet plays quite a lot with language, the poem looking very disorganized and even illogical at times. This is because the poet is not always direct about what he is talking about, preferring to resort to allusions regarding events and people. You will also notice a lot of metaphorical expressions, figurative speech, and euphemisms mixed with idioms, colloquial and slang, which further convey a feeling of lack of structure and organization. Take, for instance, the opening lines:

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, (p. 77, ll. 1-4)

Here, ‘madness’ is almost personified, ‘the best minds’ becomes a metaphor for the Beat Generation while lines 3 and 4 use mostly slang and colloquial. 

Tense of the verbs

The poem is rendered mostly using past tense simple, and it refers to actions and people post-World War II in the...