Howl, Ginsberg's Dantean masterwork, dominated the poet's canon to his last years and formed a catechism for young bohemians in search of a mentor and mythmaker. In old age, he wished aloud that he had the vigor to start again and denounce more recent government repression with Howl II. A dynamic sermon composed in Old Testament rhythms, rich active verbs, explicit nouns, and ordinary speech, the original Howl condemns authoritarians for forcing the fringe, later called beatniks or hippies, into subhumanity. He anchored his furor on a shared experience with Carl Solomon, whom he met while both were receiving insulin shock treatment for mental illness at Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institution. The shock factor of astonishing juxtapositions — for example, the hungry figure plunging under a meat truck in search of an egg; boxcar bums traveling toward "grandfather night"; the use of shocking terms like cunt, balls, and gyzym; and personal memories of a sexual relationship with N. D. [Neal Cassady] — precipitated an investigation by San Francisco police, who censored the work for obscenity.
To control wave on wave of painful memories, a catalog of evils, and disdainful prophecy, Ginsberg tames elongated lines with sight mechanisms, primarily parallel entries preceded by repetitions of the pronoun "who." The list of complaints cites unrelated places — Atlantic City, Newark, Baltimore, Los Alamos — and intersperses jubilant acts of straight and gay sex with state coercion, alienation, despair, suicide, and expatriation. His exaggerations of injustice weave a black-on-white tapestry of suppression by which "the absolute heart of the poem of life [is] butchered out of their own bodies." Like a challenge, the innovative verve of Howl presses into the reader's face a new poetic style either exciting or exasperating, depending on the point of view.
