How we cite our quotes: (line)
Quote #1
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked (line 1)
It's important to remember that Ginsberg did not conceive of Howl as a poem about misfits and degenerates. He strongly believed that his friends and associates represented the best America had to offer.
Quote #2
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind (line 13)
Here the speaker presents America as a collection of places to get drunk and high.
Quote #3
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain,
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 (lines 26-27)
Unlike some New York intellectuals, Ginsberg did not view the middle of America as "flyover country." He took the time to explore smaller American cities like Houston and Denver.
Quote #4
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium (lines 44-45)
New York City is definitely the heart of this poem. Even when it makes side-trips to the Midwest and the West Coast, it always returns to the Big Apple. New York is an urban jungle in this poem, full of both excitement and danger, a place where you "wake up," disoriented after a long drinking spree.
Quote #5
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes (lines 59-61)
. …And Denver is the heart of the Beat movement (along, perhaps, with San Francisco). Ginsberg's friend and sometime lover Neal Cassady grew up in Denver, and it was a place to refuel and stock up during long cross-country road-trips. As in Kerouac's On the Road, Howl shows that taking to the highway could be a spiritual experience.
Quote #6
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! (line 80)
In the second section, the poem shifts toward a decisive negative portrait of America, as characterized by Moloch.
Quote #7
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bulls***!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! (lines 90-93)
The "American river" is fed by lost hopes and dreams. It represents the passage of time and hints at the fast-moving currents of capitalism.
Quote #8
I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep (line 110)
Ginsberg, Carl Solomon, and America are all in bed together. But America sounds pretty sick and also moderately pesky. We're trying to get some rest here!