I saw the best minds of my generations destroyed by madness, starving / hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro

streets at dawn looking for an angry / fix This is perhaps the most famous line in all of Ginsberg's poetry, and is also the first line of the poem. It describes the subject of the poem - the "best minds" being figures that have been rejected by society for their unwillingness to conform to its institutions and ideals. Ginsberg says that these individuals have been destroyed by madness for this reason, though their madness is also a result of their inability to live outside of the world they find themselves in. This world is represented by the harsh city and urban environment. The "negro streets" represent the poverty and depravity that characterized the hidden neighbourhoods of New York City - the places where these "best minds" had been vanished. This context had left them nothing to hope for except one more "angry fix" of drugs or alcohol, anything to numb their pain and anger and insanity.

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Chil- / dren screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! In "Howl," Moloch was a character who represented the sacrifice that America called on all its citizens to make. It was a sacrifice to unthinking patriotism, to unrestrained greed, to war and to industrial blight. This quote from "Howl" demonstrates all of those things. In Ginsberg's mind, this sacrifice created the solitude of man, not just from each other, but from the natural world. It created filth and ugliness and pollution. People sacrificed their time and love for an unobtainable wealth they would never truly have. Children and old men would suffer in the poverty created by industry's power and grab for natural resources. Young men would die "sobbing" in foreign wars initiated for unjust reasons.

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland / where you're madder than I am / I'm with you in Rockland / where you must feel very strange / I'm with you in Rockland / where you imitate the shade of my mother Carl Solomon was the saviour hero of the poem, a man that Ginsberg met during a brief stay in a mental institution, a place that Ginsberg names "Rockland" in the poem. Solomon represented the theme of insanity that was so pervasive in "Howl" and was an actual pervasive theme throughout Ginsberg's life. Ginsberg compares his own madness to Solomon's and notes that Solomon must feel strange in a place that confines his madness and restricts not just his intellectual and artistic freedom, but also his physical freedom. Ginsberg notes that Solomon imitates his mother. Naomi Ginsberg was a figure always lurking behind the scenes in Ginsberg's early poetry. Ginsberg noted that he had not dealt with his mother's insanity and institutionalization when writing "Howl" and that she is credit for much of the content of craziness and mental instability.