Thou Shalt Not Howl

An essay exploring the links between poems by Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg.

There is a much longer study of the friendship between Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth published here.

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Much has been written about the various influences on Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” but relatively little has been said about the extent to which it borrowed from Kenneth Rexroth’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” (The text can be read here.) Whilst Ginsberg from an early stage wanted the world to know about his literary lineage (citing as inspiration Smart, Whitman, Apollinaire, etc.), he downplayed the connection to Rexroth for several decades before finally admitting that he had taken some ideas from the older poet’s work.

This essay will look at these two poems and highlight a few connections, showing that Ginsberg clearly borrowed something from it even though—for many years, at least—he did not acknowledge having done so. It will then look at Ginsberg’s changing stance on this issue.

A Lament and a Memorial for Dylan Thomas

Soon after Dylan Thomas died in November 1953, Kenneth Rexroth—a poet originally from Chicago but for several decades living in San Francisco—wrote “Lament for Dylan Thomas.” He mimeographed copies and wrote “NOT FOR PUBLICATION” on the front, then disseminated them among his friends.[i] The poem was published in translation in Japan in 1953 and then by Yale Review in 1954, where it appeared alongside other tributes to Dylan by Rexroth’s friends Richard Eberhart and William Carlos Williams.

It is worth noting here that “Lament for Dylan Thomas” was not the same poem as “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” It is true that all of the first poem appears in the second but the former was much shorter. When Rexroth rewrote and expanded his poem, he totally changed the structure and more than doubled its length, as well as completely re-ordering the existing lines. “Lament for Dylan Thomas” appeared in the Yale Review in November 1954 and “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was already circulating in San Francisco’s literary circle by late January 1955, so it’s likely he rewrote it in late 1954. Interestingly, when the poem was published as a short standalone work, Rexroth denied any earlier versions had existed, claiming that he had written his poem “in one sitting, a few hours after”[ii] learning about Thomas’ death. There are a number of ways to easily disprove this aside from simply recognising that Rexroth was an incorrigible liar. For one thing, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” refers to the murder of Max Blodenheim, which occurred in February 1954, several months after Thomas’s death. Rexroth was constantly rewriting his own history in order to make himself appear hip and intelligent, typically unaware that the people around him knew he was lying.

“Thou Shalt Not Kill” was first published by Horace Schwartz—a small publisher who mimeographed and stapled the books by hand—in 1955 before it was published in Rexroth’s 1956 collection, In Defense of the Earth. It is unclear** whether Ginsberg ever read “Lament for Dylan Thomas” or if he only read the reworked “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” but although he did not make a note of it in his journals, it seems he read the Horace Schwartz version at some point in 1955. Copies were being sent out to local poets as early as January, with Robert Duncan writing about it in February and Charles Olson doing the same in June. Rexroth posted copies to friends and also seems to have distributed them via his Friday-night salons. He was, in his own words, “de facto cultural minister of San Francisco,”[iii] and his living room was the city’s primary poetic gathering place in the mid-fifties, so this was not hard to do. Ginsberg was an occasional attendee around this time and was keeping tabs on the poetic developments in the city, so he likely learned about the poem soon after its publication.

**2026 update: Ginsberg notes in an August 1954 letter to Kerouac that he had read Rexroth’s poem. Although he does not name it, he describes it clearly: “writes poem for all the dead great minor and major poets he’s known that died too young or miserable lived or died.” This means that Ginsberg had read the earlier version.

By all accounts, Rexroth’s poem quickly became a popular sensation. It was a rage-filled statement on Thomas’ passing that laid the blame for his death on a number of elements of contemporary society. Rexroth’s biographer, Linda Hamalian, noted that the poem wasn’t all about Thomas, though:

Despite Rexroth’s eminent position in San Francisco literary circles, he was still struggling to make ends meet, and persisted in believing that the Eastern establishment either ignored him or disapproved of him out-right. The powerful sense of outrage in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” descended from Rexroth’s feeling that his own destiny was also woven into the poem, that his own voice would eventually be wiped out, too. Like Thomas, he would be forgotten, a victim of a capitalist society that looked upon art and literature as mere commodities.[iv]

“Thou Shalt Not Kill” began:

They are murdering all the young men.

For half a century now, every day,

They have hunted them down and killed them.

They are killing them now.

At this minute, all over the world,

They are killing the young men.

Its most famous lines were the final three:

“You killed him! You killed him.

In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,

You son of a bitch.”

Hamalian, in A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, wrote the following commentary. The omissions are mostly chunks of Rexroth’s poem, which I have removed in order to keep this essay within the limits of “fair use” but it makes sense as an overview of the poem even with the quoted lines missing:

It is not necessarily an example of his finest work, but it stands out as undisguised and rhetorical social protest, its message so important that William Carlos Williams believed copies of the poem should have been posted on college campuses across the country. […] Occasionally, it borders on the ridiculous […] Sometimes it sounds like a recitation of clichés […] The poem can also be offensive […] Yet it does succeed in communicating one poet’s profound grief over the death of a fellow poet by its sheer force of energy and clear vision of where to lay the blame: on a society that corrupts creative energy in the name of progress.[v]

Robert Duncan, writing to Charles Olson, said that “the poem is admirable” and later in the same letter called it “excited and straight out.” He seemed to respect the “fire” in Rexroth’s work as well as the “energy and direction.”[vi] Olson responded that it was “gruesome.”[vii]

Rexroth—whom John Allen Ryan termed “Rexwrath”[viii]—was not exactly a stranger to fiery, angry, emotional outbursts. In his poetry, his criticism, his radio show, and in person, he was a quite paranoid, explosive man who reacted angrily and spewed venom with little provocation. He had deeply admired Thomas, had met him on several occasions, and felt his death was not merely a tragedy befalling one man but the inevitable consequence of a callous society that routinely destroyed its young men and which was ultimately hostile to art. Already very anti-establishment, Rexroth found another excuse to vent. Thomas had been “the most influential young poet writing in England today,” he had written whilst the Welshman was still alive. “He hits you across the face with a reeking, bloody heart, a heart full of worms and needles and black blood and thorns, a werewolf heart.”[ix] Such talent had been at odds with the oppressive cultural atmosphere, Rexroth felt, which led him to the conclusion that Thomas had not merely drunk himself to death. Rather, modern Western society had murdered him.

Henry Miller picked up on Rexroth’s intentions, writing in The Time of the Assassins that it had been written “at white heat” and going on to say “If one has any doubts about the fate which our society reserves for the poet, let him read this ‘Memorial’ to the Welsh poet.”[x] (His use of quotes around “Memorial” refers to the subtitle for Rexroth’s poem, which was “A Memorial for Dylan Thomas.”)

After “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was collected and published, a reviewer for The Nation wrote:

[It] has a magnificently passionate and bitter beginning whose power carries over to, and is taken up by, the later uni sunt stanzas which call the roll of the modern poets who have died, sickened, given up, been imprisoned, or gone mad; it carries over still further to the passages on the suicide of Hart Crane and the murder of the Bodenheims. Yet the poem as a whole is sacrificed to the self-indulgent pleasure of the poet in love with his own oratory. [The reviewer here paraphrases Rexroth unflatteringly for several lines.] The psychoanalysts, the publishers, The Nation, and the New Republic, and scientists, everybody—Einstein, Eliot, Oppenheimer, Hemingway—everyone and everything but Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg killed him![xi]

Allen Ginsberg would not have been happy to see himself mentioned in that last line for at the time he was keen to dodge any connection between his poem and Rexroth’s. As we will see, he changed his opinion about thirty years later, but for a long time he was not interested in being associated with “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” which he claimed in the 1970s was a very weak poem. Speaking to the editors of Jack’s Book, an oral biography about Kerouac, he remembered a night at one of Rexroth’s Friday salons when he “misbehaved […] very badly.” He said:

I was a little drunk there, and I’d just read “Howl” and I realized it was within Rexroth’s genre. He had just written “You Killed Dylan Thomas, You Son of a Bitch in the Grey Flannel Suit.” That’s a famous, early, sort of beatnik poem by Rexroth, self-righteously accusing the man in the Brooks Brothers suit of killing Dylan Thomas. It was a good-hearted poem, but it was not very classy, not very strong as poetics. So I got drunk and was comparing that poem with “Howl”—in my mind doing it—and I said, “Rexroth, I’m a better poet than you are, and I’m only twenty-one years old” or twenty-eight, or thirty, or whatever it was [he was twenty-nine], which was terrible behavior to him, because it was mocking him. Just like kids do to me all the time now.[xii]

Although Ginsberg reflects on his own poor behaviour here, he is nonetheless still dismissive of Rexroth’s poem, whose name he cannot remember. It was a “beatnik poem,” a term Rexroth would have loathed and it was “self-righteous.” Whilst “good-hearted […] it was not very classy, not very strong as poetics.”

It is interesting that in spite of these harsh words, Ginsberg seems to have either borrowed from Rexroth’s poem or accidentally written something very similar…

“Howl” and “Thou Shalt Not Kill”

Ginsberg began writing “Howl” in early August 1955. (You can read about what the exact date might have been in this long essay.) He wrote the poem over a period of many months and fused many interests and influences, borrowing from poets old and new, as well as from the language of the streets. He was keen to explain that Christopher Smart was a major influence and of course one can easily see Whitman’s legacy although at times Ginsberg played that down, and he often spoke of his poem as sounding like Kerouac’s work because he had been so inspired by his friend.[1]

Although Ginsberg was critical of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and at times flat-out denied any influence, there are many similarities between the two poems and given that Rexroth’s had been written two years earlier, it is clear which way the influence ran. Let’s now look at some of them.

The most obvious similarity, but one that does not necessarily imply influence, is that both poems are angry rejections of a society that crushes its creative young people. This is something even Ginsberg admitted in the above quote when he said it was Rexroth’s “genre.” But whilst Ginsberg could theoretically have read Rexroth’s poem and copied this concept, Rexroth was of course not the first person to have thought of this angle. Yet when we look closer, we see it is not merely an accusation over the death of Thomas nor a general attack on society at large. Rexroth names specific individuals. In part two, he begins listing people destroyed by an uncaring society:

What happened to Robinson,

Who used to stagger down Eighth Street,

Dizzy with solitary gin?

Where is Masters, who crouched in

His law office for ruinous decades?

Where is Leonard who thought he was

A locomotive? And Lindsay,

Wise as a dove, innocent

As a serpent, where is he?

It is hard to deny that the list of people has similarities to Ginsberg’s poem, albeit it is a much less effective attempt. Ginsberg took this concept in a slightly different direction in “The Names,” a poem that was originally a section within “Howl.” It was—in my opinion at least—not a successful poem and went through numerous forms before eventual publication, but it showed the poet’s eagerness to celebrate his friends—both living and dead—whom he viewed as having been crushed by society in the same way Rexroth did with those he admired.

One could also argue that the poems share a minor stylistic point in that Rexroth often began his sentences with a repeated word: “They… They… They… They…” etc. Ginsberg of course used “who” as the base for most of the lines in Part I of his poem, though he very clearly took this from Smart rather than Rexroth.

Where one sees the most obvious connection is in the language used. Whilst the fact that both poems are thematically very similar does not necessarily indicate any real influence of the earlier one on the later one, it is hard to overlook the use of certain uncommon words. The best example is a reference to the Canaanite god “Moloch.” Rexroth writes:

Three generations of infants

Stuffed down the maw of Moloch.

Of course, “Moloch” was the focus of Part II of Ginsberg’s poem. In the first handwritten draft, he used the word three times, each with a different spelling, but by the published version he had increased this to thirty-nine utterances. Had he perhaps recalled this from Rexroth’s poem and used it to expand on Part I, eventually pushing it further and further from Rexroth’s invocation? It certainly is an unusual point of reference. Leviticus 18:21 uses the phrase “Thou shalt not” and mentions Moloch but it prohibits child sacrifice and blasphemy rather than the titular commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” It is noteworthy that Ginsberg copied these quotes from the Bible whilst at sea in the middle of 1956. (He also copied Leviticus 18:22, which prohibits homosexual intercourse.) Some might recall that Ginsberg’s concept of Moloch stemmed from a peyote-fuelled vision of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel from mid-October 1954, but he gave this several names before settling on “Moloch” in August 1955, likely at least a few months after reading Rexroth’s poem.

Beyond these references to Moloch, both poems spoke of madness and lobotomy. Whilst these could be valid topics for poetry and their use merely coincidental (Ginsberg had a long history with “madness” and had given permission for his mother’s lobotomy), one sees some rather similar language:

How many stopped writing at thirty?

How many went to work for Time?

How many died of prefrontal

Lobotomies in the Communist Party?

How many are lost in the back wards

Of provincial madhouses?

How many on the advice of

Their psychoanalysts, decided

A business career was best after all?

One might scan this and see “Time… Lobotomies… Communist Party… madhouses…” and the general tone of it and the theme, then decide that it is quite similar to “Howl,” (particularly when comparing “How many…” with “who…”) but it is even more similar when we go back to the first draft of Ginsberg’s poem:

returning to the megnetic reality of the wards years later truly bald,

their own blood on their fingers & tears

self-delivered to truth’s final lobotomy,

and a heartfull of Time & the bleak uncle-lawyer

scream of imaginary Society blasting their eardrums

We can see in these few lines repetitions of the quoted words above, and a few lines earlier he used “madhouses” as well. In later drafts, he would refer to “supercommunist leaflets.” Thus, in just a short excerpt, we have these similarities:

If we read further, we see more:

These are just some uncommon words that appear in each poem. There are many others that less conspicuously imply influence.

Another similarity occurs in this list, which appears shortly after the above-quoted section from “Thou Shalt Not Kill”:

How many are hopeless alcoholics?

René Crevel!

Jacques Rigaud!

Antonin Artaud!

Mayakofsky!

Essenin!

Robert Desnos!

Saint Pol Roux!

Max Jacob!

All over the world

The same disembodied hand

Strikes us down.

In the first draft of “Howl,” Ginsberg wrote a very similar list that also cited Artaud and other French and Russian poets. This line was cut from all subsequent versions. Even in that first draft, he made many changes, so it is unclear exactly how it would have appeared had he not removed it completely, but its similarity to the above list is undeniable, particularly in its notion of solidarity with the named:

who read Marx Spengler Antonin Artaud Gne Gneet Genet Gurj ieff Genet Gurjieff Spengler Dostoievsky Antonin Artatrd Rimbaud Wolfe Louis Ferdinand Celine Proust Wolfe Whitman Buddha Ginsberg Kerouac Burroughs & Neal Cassady, I name them all[2]

Another similarity is that in “Howl,” Ginsberg seemed eager to use the Latin phrase “Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus” but he was unsure how. It appeared in the first draft, then disappeared until drafts #4 and #5, where it was used quite differently each time. This phrase had come to him when attempting to turn a dream of Joan Vollmer into a poem earlier that year. In Part II of “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” where Rexroth writes a list of people destroyed by society, he ends each stanza with a little rhyme that includes another four-word Latin phrase: “Timor mortis conturbat me.”

If one wanted to push this further, one could look at Rexroth’s absurdist lines, like “Henry Luce killed him with a telegram to the Pope / Mademoiselle strangled him with a padded brassiere” or perhaps the odd juxtapositions such as “Iceberg of the United Nations.” If we extend this influence to cover other poems Ginsberg was writing around the time he read “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” then we have “America.” Both poems mention Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fairly obscure connection. Both refer (again) to Time magazine. Both attack the atomic bomb. As I said above, these could be coincidental, but the more coincidences you have, the less they seem like coincidences…

Reactions

I am sure that some of you will think I am looking too hard for similarities and indeed in some cases perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to suggest Ginsberg had consciously or otherwise borrowed from Rexroth, but I think that on balance the evidence suggests that he had taken some degree of influence from Rexroth’s poem in spite of the critical comments he gave in the 1970s. It is not just me that thinks this, though. People have been commenting on similarities between the poems since soon after they were written.

The poet Bob Kaufman picked up on the links between “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and “Howl” not too long after Howl and Other Poems was published. One night at The Place—a popular bohemian hang-out in North Beach—Bob Kaufman participated in what was known as a “Blabbermouth Night,” where people could speak from a pulpit-like platform and participate in competitive poetry. Calling himself “Ginsroth Rexberg,” he read a work called “Who Killed Gene the Scrounge?” It contained these lines:

You killed him, with your 90-cent jugs of wine,

You killed him, with your Thunderbird-and-Quinine Water,

You kill him, you son of a bitches.

I’ve seen your North Beach Parties, where all the men get raped and all the girls get off scot-free!

I’ve seen your North Beach parties, where all the cops come and John Ryan gets all the cute ones![xiii]

It is interesting that he recognised the similarities and fused them, adapting a few of Rexroth’s short, angry lines and then bringing in Ginsberg’s longer, more humorous ones. The title also brings together the “who” in Ginsberg’s poem with the accusation of murder in Rexroth’s.

Ann Charters noticed the similarities, too, and her suggestion seems to have caused a minor and temporary falling-out between her and Ginsberg. Talking about the work she selected for The Portable Beat Reader, she said she wanted to collect

not only Ferlinghetti, McClure, the people at the Six [Gallery], but also the Rexroth connection. I really was trying to have it clarified that “Howl” was coming out of San Francisco. He couldn’t have written “Howl” in New York, because he’d read “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” that poem that Rexroth wrote in memoriam to Dylan Thomas; that has exactly the same theme, even uses the word “Moloch” in it. When The Annotated Howl came out—that’s another reason why Ginsberg was down on me—when The Annotated Howl ends with all the poets who had inspired him to write “Howl,” and he didn’t put in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and Rexroth, I go on Allen’s case. I said “Allen, how come you left this poem out?” “Well, I don’t think it had anything to do with ‘Howl.’” I said, “But you know, have you read it recently? You forget that it talks about Moloch as the great god.” “No.” “Well, you oughta look at this.”[xiv]

The book Charters is referring to is the cumbersomely titled Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography, whose title appears to have been inspired by The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, published in 1971. Ginsberg’s book came out in 1986 and the following year he gave an interview to Regina Weinreich, in which he made the following admission:

Ann Charters […] pointed out that Rexroth had a really terrific poem which had a big impact about the death of Dylan Thomas. “You killed him with your Brooks Brothers suit, you dirty sonofabitch.” An accusation against the middle class for having persecuted or ignored or not properly taken care of Dylan Thomas who died here in New York, heavy drinking, living at the Chelsea Hotel, visiting America. […] Rexroth in his poem also used the word “Moloch.” I probably picked it up from Rexroth. But I had forgotten that. I think that was a neurotic block out partly because I thought Rexroth’s poem was too crude, too accusatory, negative in a sense. It was in a sense the classical beatnik poem, ingenious poem, right-minded and right-hearted, but it lacked an elegance that I wanted to see in my poetry or maybe I’m being too snobbish. Do you know that poem? Very famous. I’ve forgotten, but it was a big thing around San Francisco and in poetic circles at that time, and it’s probably in his collected work, it made a big imprint on me, impression on me because it was even more bohemian than my bohemian or more beat than my beat. I wanted to say, “I’m with you in Rockland,” not “I’m against you out there in the world.” I wanted to accentuate the positive or do an alchemical job transforming lead into gold, so I think in order to accept guilt by association I recognize the Rexroth which really was the catalyst for “Howl,” so I certainly should give him credit. I’m sorry I didn’t in the book but that’s another thing a scholar can amplify.[xv]

Even though he still could not remember the poem’s name and insisted on the pejorative term “beatnik poem,” it is testament to his character that he not only acknowledged a mistake but raised it without being prompted.[3] But how strange that he had now switched from calling it a “not very strong” poem to calling it a “terrific” one.

I had previously wondered if his earlier refusal to recognise Rexroth came from some animosity between them or perhaps that he felt more comfortable pointing to the classics, to hip French poets, and to his Beat peers than the erratic Rexroth, who was respected but always embarrassing himself with his paranoia, his bragging, and his innumerable falsehoods. But here he appears to provide a believable explanation. It makes sense that it was “a neurotic block partly because [he] thought Rexroth’s poem was too crude, too accusatory, negative in a sense.” He certainly was worried about being seen as too negative after “Howl” was published and he disliked the sloppy beatnik poetry that was imitative of his but without the careful crafting.

However, that doesn’t quite sit right when you consider this line from a 1960 Ginsberg poem called “Subliminal”:

You you dirty son of a bitch I sound like Kenneth Rexroth paranoiac[xvi]

He said in the Weinreich interview that he may have borrowed something from Rexroth and then “forgotten” about it due to “a neurotic block,” but we can see that he was aware of the similarities in 1960. He also remembered enough to talk about Rexroth’s poem and its thematic link to his own in the mid-seventies. So was he being truthful? It seems not.

A part of me wonders if Ginsberg felt some degree of guilt for having used Rexroth’s work without attribution. In the mid-fifties, he was consuming a vast amount of poetry and studying it intently. He was borrowing from various sources, constantly trying to create his own voice. Had he perhaps realised at some point that he had taken a little more from Rexroth than he should have done? Had he perhaps felt that the “Moloch” connection was too obvious? Or Bartolomeo Vanzetti? Had he felt shame after being called out by Bob Kaufman? Was he worried after an essayist in the mid-seventies said that “Howl” had come “[f]rom under the shadow of Rexroth himself”?[xvii]

All artists take influence from other artists and from the world around them, with the best of them using a wide range of sources, melding it with their own life, and producing something new. Ginsberg made something entirely original with “Howl” and he was quite open about having taken inspiration and borrowed ideas from a great many sources. It is a shame that he did not credit Rexroth but then I don’t think he took much more than a few words and points of reference from the older poet’s work. Most importantly, for all Rexroth was a whiny, blustery, rage-filled, jealous old crank, he never complained about Ginsberg stealing his ideas. Knowing his personality, I feel confident that he would have raised hell if he had even the slightest reason to feel he had been treated unfairly.

Footnotes

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[1] He spoke often about “Howl” and its literary predecessors and there is much scholarship in this area, but I would recommend readers look up copies of Howl: Original Draft Facsimile and The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats. All I am interested in addressing in this essay, however, is the extent to which Ginsberg’s poem was influenced by Rexroth’s.

[2] Note that many of these names are scored out and that he never used this line again, so we do not know what exactly he wanted to say with it. The language and concept are very similar to “The Names,” which he started writing soon after, and which contributed language back to later drafts of “Howl.”

[3] Perhaps Ginsberg got the name wrong because, as I mentioned earlier in this essay, Rexroth’s poem actually had two names: “Lament for Dylan Thomas” and “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” He may have been aware of both and later become confused.

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Endnotes

[i] “Author’s Note,” Thou Shalt Not Kill

[ii] “Author’s Note,” Thou Shalt Not Kill

[iii] Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p.241

[iv] A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, p.233

[v] A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, p.231-232

[vi] An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, p.63

[vii] An Open Map, p.73

[viii] Allen Ginsberg Archive, S1b5f15

[ix] Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p.20

[x] The Time of the Assassins, p.viii

[xi] Qtd Manas, 1957, Vol X, No. 44, p.2

[xii] Jack’s Book, p.198

[xiii] Jack Goodwin Letter, 9/5/1983

[xiv] Rule of Cool, p.224-225

[xv] Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, p.124-125

[xvi] Journals Early Fifties, Early Sixties, p.154

[xvii] Qtd in Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p.409