Howl and Other Poems
by Allen Ginsberg
Summary
Allen Ginsberg's title poem opens with its most quoted line, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, and spends its long first section cataloguing, in breathless, unpunctuated runs built around the repeated word who, the artists, addicts, mental patients and drifters Ginsberg counted among his own generation's casualties, many of them modeled directly on friends: Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg had met in a psychiatric ward and to whom the poem is dedicated, and Neal Cassady, thinly disguised throughout. Its shorter second section turns to naming what did the destroying, a force Ginsberg calls Moloch after the child sacrificing god of the Old Testament, inspired by a peyote vision in which the lit windows of San Francisco's Sir Francis Drake Hotel looked to him like a screaming, mechanical face. The poem's third section speaks directly to Solomon, then a psychiatric patient again, repeating I'm with you in Rockland as a kind of vow, though Solomon himself later pointed out he was never at Rockland and the name was Ginsberg's poetic substitution for the hospitals he actually knew, before a closing Footnote reverses the poem's despair entirely, declaring everything holy in a long, incantatory list, the world, the soul, the typewriter, in a way meant to answer madness with something like blessing.
Ginsberg wrote the poem to be read aloud, its long lines built to run out of breath exactly where a speaker's own lungs would, and it lands very differently spoken than silently read; readers who find the page dense or repetitive often change their mind entirely once they hear a recording of Ginsberg himself performing it.
Ginsberg gave the poem its first public reading at San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, a night organized by the painter Wally Hedrick and hosted by the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in the audience, wired Ginsberg a telegram before the night was even over asking for the manuscript, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson's letter to Walt Whitman: I greet you at the beginning of a great career.
Historical Context & Significance
City Lights Books published Howl and Other Poems in the autumn of 1956, as the fourth title in its Pocket Poets Series, and the New York Times poet and critic Richard Eberhart traveled to San Francisco to see Ginsberg read it, then wrote an article calling it the most remarkable poem of the young group representing what he named the Beat Generation. United States customs seized 520 imported copies in March 1957, and San Francisco police arrested City Lights manager Shigeyoshi Murao and charged Ferlinghetti himself with publishing obscenity; the resulting trial, defended with American Civil Liberties Union support and nine literary experts testifying to the poem's merit, ended on October 3, 1957, when Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled the poem possessed redeeming social importance and was therefore not obscene.
No poetry prize of the era was built to recognize a work this confrontational, and the trial itself became the poem's real public introduction, covered heavily by Time and Life and turning both Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti into national figures well beyond the small audience City Lights usually reached. Howl has stayed in print continuously since, its opening line among the most quoted in American poetry, and it remains the clearest single text historians point to when dating the Beat movement's arrival in the wider culture.