Context

"Howl" was first read aloud at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955 and published in 1956 as the title work of Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. Part II turns from the elegy for Ginsberg's "best minds" to interrogate the force that destroyed them, which the poem names Moloch — the Canaanite child-devouring god, conscripted here as the figure for American industrial capitalism, the military complex, and the city itself. Ginsberg's own annotation describes the section's form: "the long line is used as a stanza form broken within into exclamatory units punctuated by a base repetition, Moloch."

How the repetition works

Diacope — broad-form epizeuxis with a short connective (here, “and” or “the”) between the repeated words. About this distinction →

Every other entry in this catalogue uses epizeuxis to record a single moment — grief, shock, awe, weariness. Ginsberg uses it to perform an exorcism. Naming a demon is, in older liturgical traditions, the first step in casting it out, and the doubled "Moloch! Moloch!" works as both invocation and accusation: the poem summons the god in order to indict and unmake it. The adjacent repetition then dilates into the diacope that scaffolds the rest of Part II — "Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!" — turning a single proper noun into the structural beat that an entire stanza is composed against. The device shows that epizeuxis can be the structural foundation of a poem, not merely a moment inside one.