became more widespread.Part two of “Howl”, written under the influence of peyote, is an accusation: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashes open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” The who from the first part is now replaced with a WHAT, which creates a more hostile tone. He compares the ear of people to a “smoking tomb”, in effect saying that it is dead and will not listen to anything he or anyone else has to say. Once again Ginsberg alludes to the hydrogen bomb in the line “whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen” When the end of the world comes, the sexual preference or the gender of a person will not matter; they will be dead anyway. Ginsberg is frustrated with the majority of people who will not accept the fact of homosexuality. The hostility shines through when he screams “Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!” Each phrase is ended with an exclamation point. He repeats the word Moloch is almost every line, which is a god of the Ammonites and Phoenicians to whom parents offered their children to be burnt in sacrifice. Perhaps this is some sort of litany or prayer to this god, Ginsberg feels that society is offering their children, the outcasts, to be sacrificed.Part three begins like a peptalk or a get well card: “Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you are madder than I am” This final section of the poem unfolds as once again Ginsberg uses the image of Golgotha in “where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against fascist national Golgotha” The most obvious of techniques in “Howl”, and in the last part is the use of repetition. “It is Biblical in its repetitive grammatical buildup. It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit, assuming that the louder and more often you shout the more likely you are to be hear...
