"Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell," William Carlos Williams once said of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". Ginsberg's most famous poem depicts the beauty and suffering in the lives of addicts, alcoholics, and the generally mental ill, and uses the poem to discuss how addicts are at the mercy of Moloch, the Canaanite God of sacrifice. Ginsberg refers to addiction in "Howl" not only in the sense of drug addiction, but also in society's addiction to materialism, consumerism, and capitalism, and by extension, Moloch is a God of American institutions that has largely failed its most vulnerable residents.