Ginsbergs Howl a Counterculture Manifesto Essay

Ginsbergs Howl: a Counterculture Manifesto Allen Ginsberg dives into the wreck of himself and of the world around him to salvage himself and something worth saving of the world. In this process, he composes Howl to create a new way of observation for life through the expression of counterculture. Protesting against technocracy, sex and revealing sexuality, psychedelic drugs, visionary experience, breaking the conventions of arts and literature; all basic characteristics of counterculture are combined and celebrated in Howl, as it becomes `a counterculture manifesto for the first time. Howl elaborates the results of technocracy, as it mechanizes the human soul, human creativity. Technocracy takes away the emotion, feeling, random†¦show more content†¦Howl is meant to appeal to the secret or hermetic tradition of art. This poem liberates readers from their false self-deprecating image of themselves and to persuade them that they are angels. Howl is a freedom of language, political honesty, and spontaneous mind. Howl ha s always been Allen Ginsbergs masterpiece- a horrifying, funny, surreal, and prophetic poem. Howl is a proper manifestation of counterculture. Counterculture is a movement, a protest, and a total rejection of all established assumptions. Counter culture is a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that scarcely looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion. It is the experience of radical cultural disjuncture, the clash of irreconcilable concepts of life. It started as a movement against government during 50s and 60s, mainly led by the students of Europe, as a campus rebellion, an act of war resistance, a demonstration against racial injustice. It goes against the futility of a politics, which concentrates itself single-mindedly on the overthrowing of governments, or ruling classes, or economic systems. Counterculture is a healthy instinct, which refuses both at the personal and political level to practice such a cold-blooded rape of our human sensibilities. It is the young, arriving with eyes that can see the obvious, who must remark the lethal culture of their elders, and who must remake