How Allen Ginsberg's Howl describes the Beat movement
Learn more about Allen Ginsberg's epic poem Howl.
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Transcript
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” So begins Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl,” which put the Beat movement on the literary map after Ginsberg’s reading of it at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955.
In “Howl” Ginsberg denounces what he saw as the soulless, money-obsessed obscenity of American society. Like much of Beat literature, it is autobiographical. In recounting the experiences of Ginsberg and his friends, it attempts to illuminate universals. Suffused with sexuality and spirituality, horror and humor, despair and hope, “Howl” is profane and profound, a gainsay and a goof.
Its frank sexual references landed its publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in court on charges of distributing obscene material. But he was acquitted in 1957 in a landmark decision.
“Howl” altered the landscape of mid-20th-century poetry and sounded a clarion call for the counterculture that followed.
In “Howl” Ginsberg denounces what he saw as the soulless, money-obsessed obscenity of American society. Like much of Beat literature, it is autobiographical. In recounting the experiences of Ginsberg and his friends, it attempts to illuminate universals. Suffused with sexuality and spirituality, horror and humor, despair and hope, “Howl” is profane and profound, a gainsay and a goof.
Its frank sexual references landed its publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in court on charges of distributing obscene material. But he was acquitted in 1957 in a landmark decision.
“Howl” altered the landscape of mid-20th-century poetry and sounded a clarion call for the counterculture that followed.