"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg Close Reading Essay

Read carefully the following poem by Allen Ginsberg about civilization. Then write an essay in which you describe the speaker’s attitude toward civilization. Using specific references to the text, show how the use of language reveals the speaker’s attitude.

            In “Howl”, Allen Ginsberg uses exclamatory phrases and reversed personification to create a tone of desperation, a plea for man to reject Moloch—the horrors of civilization incarnate—before it destroys that which makes a human, human.

            Every sentence within Part II ends with an exclamation point in order to lace Ginsberg’s warnings with a trace of panic. The appositives in “Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!” are all exclamatory, and serve to emphasize the immediacy with which Moloch is pervading modern society, and how it’s necessary to take just as immediate action (Ginsberg II. 2) before Moloch’s destructive hand takes over all mankind. The poem itself is an appeal to man to understand the horrors that civilization and technology are enacting, and such an appeal requires a degree of passion, passion that Ginsberg conveys through exclamation. The pacing of the poem itself is reliant on the multiple exclamatory statements. When it is noted that Moloch has disposed of “Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!”, the individual exclamation points create a sense of acceleration, of escalation, that the list of spiritual and mental goods Moloch has crushed does not and will not stop (Ginsberg II. 30).

            Ginsberg not only expresses the terrors of Moloch through exclamatory statements but through the personification of Moloch as well, granting Moloch—who has been identified as the dark heart of civilization—characteristics of something sentient, something living, something human. Moloch is given a “mind of pure machinery…blood of running money” to reinforce that not only is Moloch a symbol for the consequences of technology, but that it is not stagnant (Ginsberg II. 10). Because Moloch is given the qualities of a living organism, it must be capable of growth. By personifying Moloch into such a being, Ginsberg argues that Moloch is not a problem that will go away on its own—rather, it’s a problem that will continue to manifest itself. If mankind does not put an end to Moloch, Ginsberg asserts that Moloch will put an end to mankind.
            The similarities not only thematically but structurally between Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Huxley’s works are ubiquitous, and compound on one another to reinforce the identical themes of progress ruining mankind. Both Moloch and Belial act as divine figures interceding in the minds of men with the goal of pushing mankind into chaos and self-destruction. Both figures intervene through "the vast stone of war...pure machinery" (Ginsberg II. 9-11), with "flesh subordinated to iron and mind made the slave of wheel" (Huxley 52); in essence, both demonic figures dominate men through machines and technology, the very things society finds most representative of progress. And why do both Huxley and Ginsberg find progress to be so disadvantageous? Again, the reasoning is similar. Everything that makes life worth living, everything that makes humans and their experiences what they are, go "down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!" (Ginsberg II. 30-31), as all are sacrificed, in some sense, to the false god Moloch. Mankind unconsciously sacrifices to Belial as well with "the value of the individual soul fading away...old compunctions and compassions evaporating" (Huxley 56) to make room for the ideals the portrayed evil god wishes mankind to see. Enslaved by the gods of technology and progress, worshiping consumerism and mass production, humans in the works of both Huxley and Ginsberg portray the slow but sure downward spiral of mankind.