from Howl

The entire poem is extremely long and I will only be blogging about the section Amy White has given to me!

from Howl

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.
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
    to the stary dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyes and high sat up smoking
    in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across
     the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw
    Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs
    illuminated,
who passes through universities with radiant cool eyes
    hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-llight tragedy among the
    scholars of war,
who were expelled from academies for crazy and publishing
    obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their
    money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through
    the wall,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank Turpentine in Paradise
    Alley, death or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, and alcohol
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar
    to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
yacketyakking  screaming vomiting whispering facts and
    memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of
   hospitals and jails and wars,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off
    the roof waving genitals and manuscripts
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully,
    gave up and were forced to open antique stores where
    they thought they were growing old and cried . . .

                                                -by Allen Ginsberg.

First off, a solute. I have read the entire thing and this is a great section from it. Best piece of writing I have read so far. Brutally honest and to the point. It makes you think, it scares you, it makes you cringe. Only the best pieces of writing can do that to it's readers. After reading it the first time I couldn't help but read it five more. The truth lies in this poem!

"Ginsberg, Allen (3 June 1926-6 Apr. 1997), poet, was born in Newark, New Jersey, the younger son of Louis Ginsberg, a high school English teacher and poet, and Naomi Levy Ginsberg. Ginsberg grew up with his older brother Eugene in a household shadowed by his mother's mental illness; she suffered from recurrent epileptic seizures and paranoia. An active member of the Communist Party-USA, Naomi Ginsberg took her sons to meetings of the radical left dedicated to the cause of international Communism during the Great Depression of the 1930s. "    -famouspoetsandpoems.com

He also to drugs. There is evidence that he took psychedelic stimulants that helped in vision his poetry. I am not promoting drug use or agreeing with his decision to use, but this is a fantastic poem.

Parts of Ginsberg life definitely has contributed to his rather dark poem and short writings.

I feel like if I try to analyze this poem I will ruin it. I will end up beating it with a damned stick and leave it bleeding horrible. Everyone will get something different from this poem and in no way do I want to influence those thoughts. Breath taking!