Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

Check out this Allen Ginsberg page from Poetry Foundations website. 
Go here for information on the Howl obscenity trial.

Allen Ginsberg reads "Howl."

Ginsberg is one of seminal poets of the Beat generation from the 1950s. His friendship with fellow authors Jack Kerouac (author of On the Road) and William Burroughs (author of Naked Lunch) are legendary. Kerouac's On the Road (1957) is based on the travels of the Beat generation authors across America in the 1940s. 

"Howl"(1956) celebrated the emerging counterculture and denounced American conservatism. The poem became a manifesto for the Beats and Ginsberg emerged as an important social presence."Beat"is coined by Kerouac with its punning overtones of "beaten down" and "beatified"

Four major influences on Ginsberg are William Blake, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and Zen Buddhism. 

The poem, "Howl" is consisted of "long clanky statements" that permit "not the way you would say it, a thought, but the way you would think it… We think rapidly in visual images as well as words, and if each successive thoughts were transcribed in tis confusion…you get a slightly different prosody than if you were talking slowly"(from Ginsberg's letter) 

The poem is consisted of three parts:

Part I is a single run-on sentence with a repetitive refrain that describes the states of madness. How have the best minds gone mad? What are their insane lives like?

Part II describes what caused such maddens. Consider what Moloch stands for.

Part III uses the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland" as a refrain to each line. It establishes a context of emotional support  for Carl Solomon who was Ginsberg's friend. They met at a psychiatric hospital. Ginsberg dedicated this poem to Solomon.