One of the prevalent and interesting themes that I really enjoyed in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was madness. The whole piece already feels like the ramblings and thoughts of a madman, but the theme of madness is most evident in the first section. The first line even addresses it directly saying, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” Upon first reading, I got the impression that the madness he writes about comes from creative geniuses who don’t know how to function in the world so they lose their minds. For example, “whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes…” feels like he’s talking about intelligent minds slowly losing their way into the madness he writes about. But on further examination, especially in section three, it seems that Ginsberg thinks everyone else has gone mad and it is the creative geniuses who have it right. It’s in the third section where he writes about Carl Solomon who “scream[s] in a straightjacket that [he’s] losing the game of the actual ping pong into the abyss.” Ginsberg sees Solomon as a creative genius and “great writer”, but thinks that the psychiatric hospital he’s at is ruining him. It’s interesting to see how Ginsberg appears to have some degree of madness, but in reality it’s the normal everyday society around us that he thinks is mad.
One of the techniques and the form that makes Howl so successful is that it is free verse. Ginsberg isn’t constrained to rhyme or even write complete sentences with correct punctuation. This technique enhances the sense of madness and chaos that Ginsberg writes about. At first, the writing looks very scrambled and all over the place (which I believe it is meant to be like), but if someone reads it in the way it is written as a giant run-on free verse, the madness comes alive and readers can sense it better.
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