Allen Ginsberg : Howl

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movement known as the Beat Generation. Ginsberg's subject matter focused on the activities of his social circle and included such things as drug use and homosexual sex. These topics hadn't been written about so openly, without some sort of literary masking before. Ginsberg's far-ranging, wildly expressive style greatly impacted the evolution of modern literature. His literary odyssey created a vast legacy of poetry and the publication of many books of poetry and prose. Perhaps most notable, "Howl," was published in 1956 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. A landmark court decision found "Howl" to be "not obscene" (Ehrlich 57).
Allen Ginsberg's monumental poem was first heard in a series of famous readings that signaled the arrival of the Beat Generation of writers. The first of these readings took place in October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. It was Allen Ginsberg's first public performance, and it made him instantly famous at ...

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of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in police cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication ... (Ginsberg 7)
Each of these describe real-life events by people Ginsberg knew, but the poem is especially dedicated to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's insane hyper-intellectual friend who he'd met in a mental hospital years before. In the poem, Ginsberg makes mention of Solomon's actions at a lecture where he threw potato salad at the professor teaching on Dadaism. It is Carl Solomon's insanity that drove Ginsberg to write this poem, especially because it reminded him of his mother's own unspeakable insanity ...

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