Editing Allen Ginsberg (section)

===Inspiration from friends===
Ginsberg claimed throughout his life that his biggest inspiration was Kerouac's concept of "[[spontaneous prose]]." He believed literature should come from the soul without conscious restrictions. Ginsberg was much more prone to revise than Kerouac. For example, when Kerouac saw the first draft of ''Howl'', he disliked the fact that Ginsberg had made editorial changes in pencil (transposing "negro" and "angry" in the first line, for example). Kerouac only wrote out his concepts of spontaneous prose at Ginsberg's insistence because Ginsberg wanted to learn how to apply the technique to his poetry.<ref name="auto"/>

The inspiration for ''Howl'' was Ginsberg's friend, [[Carl Solomon]], and ''Howl'' is dedicated to him. Solomon was a [[Dada]] and [[Surrealism]] enthusiast (he introduced Ginsberg to [[Artaud]]) who had bouts of clinical depression. Solomon wanted to commit suicide, but he thought a form of suicide appropriate to dadaism would be to go to a mental institution and demand a [[lobotomy]]. The institution refused, giving him many forms of [[psychotherapy|therapy]], including [[Electroconvulsive therapy|electroshock therapy]]. Much of the final section of the first part of ''Howl'' is a description of this.

Ginsberg used Solomon as an example of all those ground down by the machine of "[[Moloch]]." Moloch, to whom the second section is addressed, is a [[Semitic gods|Levantine god]] to whom children were sacrificed. Ginsberg may have gotten the name from the [[Kenneth Rexroth]] poem "Thou Shalt Not Kill," a poem about the death of one of Ginsberg's heroes, [[Dylan Thomas]]. Moloch is mentioned a few times in the [[Torah]] and references to Ginsberg's Jewish background are frequent in his work. Ginsberg said the image of Moloch was inspired by [[peyote]] visions he had of the Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco which appeared to him as a skull; he took it as a symbol of the city (not specifically San Francisco, but all cities).<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Kramer |first=Jane |date=August 10, 1968 |title=The Father of Flower Power |url=http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1968/08/17/paterfamilias-i |magazine=The New Yorker |access-date=April 3, 2022}}</ref> Ginsberg later acknowledged in various publications and interviews that behind the visions of the Francis Drake Hotel were memories of the Moloch of [[Fritz Lang]]'s film ''[[Metropolis (1927 film)|Metropolis]]'' (1927) and of the woodcut novels of [[Lynd Ward]].<ref name="orig"/> Moloch has subsequently been interpreted as any system of control, including the conformist society of post-World War II America, focused on material gain, which Ginsberg frequently blamed for the destruction of all those outside of societal norms.<ref name="auto"/>

He also made sure to emphasize that Moloch is a part of humanity in multiple aspects, in that the decision to ''defy'' socially created systems of control—and therefore go against Moloch—is a form of self-destruction. Many of the characters Ginsberg references in ''Howl'', such as Neal Cassady and Herbert Huncke, destroyed themselves through excessive substance abuse or a generally wild lifestyle. The personal aspects of ''Howl'' are perhaps as important as the political aspects. Carl Solomon, the prime example of a "best mind" destroyed by defying society, is associated with Ginsberg's schizophrenic mother: the line "with mother finally fucked" comes after a long section about Carl Solomon, and in Part III, Ginsberg says: "I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother." Ginsberg later admitted that the drive to write ''Howl'' was fueled by sympathy for his ailing mother, an issue which he was not yet ready to deal with directly. He dealt with it directly with 1959's ''Kaddish'',<ref name="auto"/> which had its first public reading at a [[Catholic Worker Movement|Catholic Worker]] Friday Night meeting, possibly due to its associations with [[Thomas Merton]].<ref>{{Cite web |last=Cornell |first=Tom |author-link=Tom Cornell |title=Catholic Worker Pacifism: An Eyewitness to History |url=http://catholicworker.com/peacetc.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100317165844/http://www.catholicworker.com/peacetc.htm |archive-date=March 17, 2010 |access-date=May 1, 2010 |website=Catholic Worker Homepage}}</ref>