Borbála Kerekes

A Purgatory of Freedom: Allen Ginsberg's Fight for Spiritual Liberation in Howl Borbála Kerekes

Drug, alcohol, sex, relationships, togetherness, loneliness, literature, obscenity, homosexuality, wandering, homelessness, art, thousands of corrupted angels, freedom, limitation, liberation, friendship, poetry, a movement. The spell that Beat literature still casts upon us originates in the elementary: our human wish for being free from human limitations. Is spiritual liberation a state that can be reached at all? Howl has the answer in it. After presenting a historical, social and literal glimpse into the era of the American Beat generation, this book offers a guide to the Beat bible that is Howl by Allen Ginsberg. The main motif along which the work analyzes Ginsberg's poem is spiritual liberation. Though apparently the Beats seem to be free from for example society, it is quesionable whether they could find their wished state of perfect freedom. The spell of Ginsberg is especially powerfull in our world of apparently no limits where all the fights had already been fought instead of us. If only we could be our own freedom fighters, too.