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“Howl” is a free-verse poem, which means it doesn’t use a pre-established metrical scheme. Ginsberg has instead devised his own rhythmic method. This method cannot be ascertained through the application of traditional methods of scansion, where we might look for patterns of metrical feet like iambs, trochees, and so on. Rather, the key to Ginsberg’s management of rhythm lies in his extreme experimentation with line length. Ginsberg’s use of long lines has two key precedents in English-language poetry: the British Romantic poet William Blake and the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman. Both Blake and Whitman used unusually long lines, which gave their work a sense of liberating and sometimes even breathless expansion. Ginsberg draws on both of these figures, though ultimately he pushes the long line further than either of them. Indeed, perhaps the first thing a reader notices when looking at “Howl” is the sheer density of the text. Whereas most poems contain somewhere between eight and twelve syllables per line, the lines in “Howl” are so long they regularly take up between two and five printed lines of text. In this sense, Ginsberg’s poetry verges on prose.

Although it would be easy to mistake “Howl” for oddly formatted prose, the poetic nature of Ginsberg’s language asserts itself through a complex layering of rhythm. For one thing, Ginsberg manipulates the poem’s rhythm by managing the length of individual lines. Each line in the poem constitutes an individual unit of thought. This fact creates a sense of order in what might otherwise seem a chaotic spill of words. It also inevitably imposes a sense of rhythm. If you read passages of the poem aloud, you’ll naturally sense the shifting rhythm that arises as you move from line to line. Ginsberg also generates rhythm through the specific language he deploys in each line. Here, though, we need to break things down further and talk about the different kinds of lines Ginsberg uses in each part of the poem. The lines in part 1 tend to tumble headlong at a breathless pace, as in line 67:

   and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia

By contrast, the lines in part 2 have a chunkier feel, since they’re broken into series of individually punctuated exclamations, as in line 90:

   Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Finally, part 3 features a mix of the rhythmic styles of parts 1 and 2, which emerges in the way each unit of thought is broken into two parts, as in lines 116–17:

   I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

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