In Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” mental illness or madness is the result of society’s oppression. The sensitive people are literally driven crazy by the violence of society, but they are the ones who are the heroes of the poem. Let’s look at this in more detail.

These rebel heroes challenge society, but it slowly drives them crazy as they refuse to conform to its ways. Their madness is associated with drugs, sex, art, and mysticism, but the poet implies that perhaps they are really the sane ones and that society itself is actually mad.

Ginsberg especially identifies capitalism as a source of madness, and he symbolizes society by the god Moloch, to whom peoples of the past sacrificed their children. He associates Moloch with filth and greed, with industries and urbanization. All of these consume people and consume their sanity. The rebels try to free themselves, but the struggle in itself can lead to insanity.

In the third part of the poem, Ginsberg writes of being in Rockland State Hospital, a mental institution, with his friend Carl Solomon as they both battle mental illness. He paints a vivid picture of mental illness and its effects. Yet in a way, madness is freeing, for it separates one from the insane world.