Life & Background
Ginsberg was born in Newark in 1926 to a schoolteacher-poet father and a mother, Naomi, whose severe mental illness dominated his childhood and is the subject of his elegy Kaddish. At Columbia he met Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and the group became the nucleus of the Beat Generation. He worked in market research in San Francisco before quitting to write full time. The 1955 Six Gallery reading, where he first performed Howl, is usually taken as the movement's public birth; Lawrence Ferlinghetti published it, and the resulting obscenity trial in 1957 ended in a ruling that the poem had redeeming social importance. Ginsberg spent the following decades as poet, teacher, and activist — against the Vietnam war, for gay liberation, in Buddhist practice after study with Tibetan teachers, and travelling in India in 1962–63. He died in New York in 1997.
Howl
A poem in three parts with a footnote. Part I is a single enormous sentence built on the repeated word who, cataloguing the lives of the poet's contemporaries — the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, moving through cities, universities, jazz, drugs, poverty, psychiatric hospitals, and encounters with the police. Part II names the destroying force as Moloch, the Canaanite idol demanding child sacrifice, identified here with money, industry, government, and the machinery of American life, invoked in a hammering repetition. Part III addresses Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met in a psychiatric institution, with the refrain that he is with him in Rockland. The Footnote declares everything holy in a rising litany.
The long line is taken from Whitman and from Hebrew liturgy, and the poem is built for the voice: it uses breath rather than metre as its unit, in line with the Beat idea of spontaneous composition, though the manuscripts show heavy revision. The anaphora — who, Moloch, I'm with you — gives it the structure of incantation rather than argument. Its frankness about drug use and homosexual experience is what put it on trial in 1957, and Judge Horn's ruling that the work possessed redeeming social importance became a precedent that widened what American publishers could risk, clearing ground for Lady Chatterley and Naked Lunch. Critically the poem is often read as Blakean prophecy transposed to postwar America.
Why Ginsberg Matters
Howl is the defining poem of the Beat Generation and one of the most consequential obscenity cases in American publishing history. Ginsberg's open-form, breath-based line and his insistence that private life including sexuality is legitimate public material reshaped American poetry after 1956, and his role as a public figure — protest, Buddhism, gay liberation, and his sustained interest in Indian religious traditions during his year on the subcontinent — makes him a bridge between literature and the counterculture.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Howl and Other Poems1956
- Kaddish and Other Poems1961
- Reality Sandwiches1963
- Planet News1968
- The Fall of America1973
- Indian Journals1970