taken from: ginsberg's poem 'howl'original text:'[...] Moloch whose Soul is electricity and banks!
Moloch whose Poverty is the specter of Genius
Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen
Moloch whose name is the Mind. Robot apartments [...]'about the quoted person:American poet and leading apostle of the beat generation. His first published work, Howl and Other Poems (1956), sparked the San Francisco Renaissance and defined the generation of the '50s with an authority and vision that had not occurred in the United States since T. S. Eliot captured the anxiety of the 1920s in The Waste Land. Ginsberg's bardic rage against material values, however, was in a voice very different from Eliot's scholarly mourning for the loss of the spirit. In his second major work, Kaddish (1961), a poem on the anniversary of his mother's death, Ginsberg described their anguished relationship. In the 1960s, while vigorously participating in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he published several poetic works, including Reality Sandwiches (1963) and Planet News (1969). The Fall of America received the National Book Award for 1974. Collected Poems, 1947-85 (1995) contains all of his important work; White Shroud (1987) includes poems from the 1980s. In the early 80's, Ginsberg became involved with the punk movement and appeared on a Clash (see rudi can't fail) album and also performed at their concerts.

Ginsberg died in 1997. He saw himself as a part of the prophetic tradition in poetry begun by William Blake and continued by Walt Whitman. He named his contemporary influences as William Carlos Williams and his friend jack kerouac.

Moloch was a form of the Baals, a god of the Ammonites. The Bible claims that the worship of Moloch involved the sacrifice of young children by passing them through fire. This god was worshipped in Carthage, where the Romans described the sacrifice of children in his honour. Moloch was generally depicted as a man with the head of a bull. Instead of legs his statues had a construction similar to a dome (on which the body was surmounted) with fire always lit, into which children were sacrificed. The arms of the statue had a mechanism that, when the child was put on the god's hands, was moved by the priests, so the arms were raised to the mouth and the baby was "swallowed" by the god and fell into the fire.