The third section is addressed to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's close friend from the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. For Ginsberg, Moloch is associated with war, government, capitalism, and mainstream culture, all of which might be summed up by one of the poem's most important concepts: the 'machine' or 'machinery.' Moloch is an inhuman monster that kills youth and love. The religious context and history of Moloch is extremely complicated, so it's better to stick to the poem's own definition. In the Hebrew Bible, Moloch was an idolatrous god to whom children were sacrificed by placing them in fire. If the key word of the first section was 'who,' the second section asks 'What?' As in, what destroyed the best minds of his generation? Ginsberg provides the answer immediately: Moloch. According to the speaker, they are drug users, drop outs, world travelers, bums, musicians, political dissidents, and, yes, poets. They were not people whom most middle-class folks in the 1950s would have identified with the best America had to offer. We quickly learn that these 'best minds' were not doctors, lawyers, and scientists. These are people 'who did this, who did that,' etc. Most lines begin with the word 'who' followed by a verb. He doesn't tell us what destroyed them quite yet, though we get plenty of hints.

The rest of the section is a detailed description of these people – specifically, who they were and what they did. In the first line of the first section, the speaker tells us that he has been a witness to the destruction of 'the best minds' of his generation. You could even think of the poem as three enormous run-on sentences. Each of these sections is a prolonged 'riff' on a single subject. Howl appears to be a sprawling, disorganized poem.

Carl solomon howl