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It’s difficult to summarize the tone of “Howl” in a single word. On the one hand, as a work that takes the form of a litany, the poem has a prayerful tone that at once celebrates the American imagination and mourns its decay. (For more on this point, see the essay on Structure.) In addition to being prayerful, “Howl” also has an incantatory tone. The adjective incantatory derives from the noun incantation, which refers to the use of spells or verbal charms in a ritual context, often with the intention of producing magical effects. Although Ginsberg isn’t casting a magical spell in “Howl,” he is certainly using language in a ritualistic way that produces a hypnotic effect. In part 1, especially, the lines are characterized by a spilling-over of words that strain conventional poetics. As just one example, consider the incantatory language in line 70:

   Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon

Finally, when taken as a whole, “Howl” also has an apocalyptic tone. In this sense, the poem harkens back to much older works of Jewish and Christian mysticism, which used symbolically rich imagery to anticipate the imminent destruction of the profane world. “Howl” offers a similarly rich apocalyptic vision, in this case related to the destruction of the American imagination.

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