Howl Freedom and Confinement Quotes

How we cite the quotes:
(line)

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, (lines 103-104)

Despite their poverty, the hipsters attain a measure of freedom in their imaginations. In their minds, they are "floating." They seek unity with nature and the ecstasy of music.

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room (lines 20-21)

Not being tied down by oppressive jobs or social obligations, they can drop everything and skip town for weeks on end. But they might still be slaves to drug addiction, as they undergo the painful symptoms of withdrawal after trying to quit.

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire place Chicago (lines 28-29)

Freedom for the Beat movement was tied up with the ability to travel widely around the country and the world. They can leave without a trace and resurface months or even years later with a lifetime's worth of stories to tell. That, at least, is the romantic vision of the Beats.

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, he sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, (lines 36-38)

Howl associates sexual freedom with religious enlightenment.

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too (lines 42-43)

Neal Cassady (N.C.) was the paragon of personal freedom for many Beat writers. He was said to have had an astonishing number of sexual encounters in his lifetime, which added to his mystique.

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality (line 56)

The speaker compares being forced to take a Madison Avenue advertising job in order to pay the bills to warfare on the soul.

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! (line 88)

Moloch stands for mental and physical confinement. The speaker believes that American consumerism and the military-industrial complex have been corrosive on personal freedom.

I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx (lines 101-103)

Carl Solomon is physically confined by the walls of the Rockland hospital, but the more serious confinement occurs in his mind, which will "no longer admit" normal perception. We don't know whether "the spinster of Utica" is real or a figment of his imagination.

I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse (line 105)

The speaker maintains that Solomon's soul is pure even as his mind goes to seed. He regards it as a tragedy for the soul to be confined within a mental hospital.

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