How we cite our quotes: (line)
Quote #4
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium (lines 44-45)
New York City is definitely the heart of this poem. Even when it makes side-trips to the Midwest and the West Coast, it always returns to the Big Apple. New York is an urban jungle in this poem, full of both excitement and danger, a place where you "wake up," disoriented after a long drinking spree.
Quote #5
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes (lines 59-61)
. …And Denver is the heart of the Beat movement (along, perhaps, with San Francisco). Ginsberg's friend and sometime lover Neal Cassady grew up in Denver, and it was a place to refuel and stock up during long cross-country road-trips. As in Kerouac's On the Road, Howl shows that taking to the highway could be a spiritual experience.