Howl
Lost in America with Allen Ginsberg
Introduction and Thesis
Allen Ginsberg is not the typical hero that films, literature, and vapid mass media insist the masses revere. He was a man beset with a host of psychological scars that are worryingly commonplace in modern America. He was a convert to Buddhism, avowed drug user, and was openly homosexual in a time when it was politically, criminally, and physically dangerous. From the artistic and spiritual mind of this man came the architecture of a cultural reformation. “Writing openly about spiritual and sexual experience, Ginsberg’s activism and charismatic readings made him a counter-culture hero in the 1960s” (Noel-Tod). As a writer and poet Allen Ginsberg arrived nearly fully formed, with a vicious literary mind and unparalleled poetic voice that still echoes forward in time. Ginsberg’s poem Howl lit a fire in the politically and sexually oppressed public consciousness that birthed a literary and cultural movement that advocated political rebellion, embraced sexuality and spirituality, fostered relevant conversation about mental illness, and proved a stalwart defender of the freedom of speech.
About the Author
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 and raised in New Jersey. He was born to Louis Ginsberg, a schoolteacher and amateur poet, and Naomi Ginsberg (née Levy), a Marxist Russian emigree. As a teenager, he began writing with purpose by sending letters to The New York Times about cultural and political topics. He obtained a Young Men’s Hebrew Association scholarship in 1943 and attended Columbia University for pre-law before changing his major to literature. His artistic clashes with his professors led to him forming an off-campus circle of writers and friends, most notably William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Together they would form the foundation of the Beat Movement, America’s first notable Cold War counterculture literary movement that drew modern inspiration from drug culture, eastern spirituality, sexual freedom, and life on the streets (Carlise).
While still a student at Columbia, Ginsberg was tangentially and circumstantially implicated in storing stolen property, to which he pled to a psychological disability to avoid a prison sentence. Being no stranger to mental illness, he was admitted to Columbia Psychiatric Institute for an eight-month sentence. While there he formed a friendship with Carl Solomon, who went on to pen the poem Report from an Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient. Years after his release but before the birth of Howl, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco and moved in with a girlfriend. At his psychiatrist’s urging, Ginsberg ended that relationship to live with and deepen his relationship with his boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky. They remained companions and enjoyed an ethical if not legal marriage until Ginsberg’s death in 1997 from a heart attack brought on from complications from liver cancer, mere days after being diagnosed.
About the Poem
The poem Howl for Carl Solomon, or simply Howl as it’s known in its truncated form, was titularly gifted to Ginsberg’s fellow author and professional lunatic-saint Carl Solomon. However, its title belies its actual recipient, the provider of its emotional foundation, which was Ginsberg’s mother. She lamentably was in and out of mental hospitals her adult life and died in one in 1956. Howl was first read aloud in San Francisco in 1955 to uproar and fanfare, and as Al Aronowitz recounts, “almost overnight, Howl became the Manifesto of the Beat Generation” (3). Its words and message were radical and controversial, tackling taboo themes of conformity, mental illness, (explicitly gay) sexuality, drug culture, amok capitalism, and perhaps most importantly, the freedom of speech. Ginsberg masterfully crafted a poem in three acts that contained an escalating series of laments of a grim modern worldview that was structurally reminiscent of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Meyers).
To the castoffs of a subjugated generation, Ginsberg was a commanding, articulate voice, and Howl was underground poetry, a standard-bearer in a nightmare world wherein “scholars support wars, radios read minds, and America has turned into a fascist state” (Raskin xiii). Ginsberg had traversed neon-soaked nighttime tenements, the down and out were his adopted tribe; he intimately knew life from the bottom looking up. The counterculture was there, nascent and unformed, it only needed a voice to guide it. Instead, it was gifted with an inferno of possibilities, a deafening Howl against all of the self-doubt and cultural despair levied upon the civilians of the Cold War.
Legacy
In his authoritative tome American Scream, an unparalleled recount of Ginsberg and the emergence of the Beat Generation, author Jonah Raskin expounded upon the exposed and raw nerves it touched in the disenfranchised youth and scholars of the day, “Howl spoke for so many of us in a time of McCarthyism and grim, stark, cold war silence, it was as though Allen drew a line in the sand” (7). If indeed a line was drawn in the sand, then the city of San Francisco and United States Customs officers brazenly stepped over it when they arrested Lawrence Ferlinghetti and imposed obscenity charges against him as its publisher. In a landmark decision, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Howl and Other Poems, while it employed language that was subjectively coarse and vulgar, was not obscene and had redeeming social importance.
This legal opinion and its subsequent ruling carved out significantly greater protection for artists and their work. Both the scurrilous act of officialdom and the ruling denouncing the obsequious overreach of the government provided immense publicity for Howl and increased the demand for Ginsberg’s poetry readings. Howl and Other Poems sold over 800,000 copies before the end of the millennium. More than six decades later, Howl is still taught in colleges and select military academies. Ginsberg crafted a work and movement that obliterated the notion that poetry was interminably relegated to stuffy literary elites and not that of the general populace; his poetry was a salvo of emotion and observation designed to be consumed by anyone. In a world that has not outgrown the cultural and political troubles endemic during its creation, where insightful and purposeful rebellion against authority is mandatory, Howl and Ginsberg-at-large remain as inspirational forces to be admired and feared.
Works Cited
Allen Ginsberg papers, M0733. Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.
Aronowitz, Al, and Allen Ginsberg. “Portrait of a Beat.” First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 1–13, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1n2ttfc.4.
Carlise, Chuck. “The Beat Movement.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. 26. Oxford University Press. Date of access 04 Nov. 2021, https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-664
Fogel, Lynn Michelle. We Got the Beat: Transcendentalism, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and the Inception of a New, Postmodern Generation. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2009.
Jenkins, Sarah E. “Howl and Other Poems.” Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature, Second Edition, Facts On File, 2013. Bloom’s Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=95547&itemid=WE54&articleId=35409. Accessed 04 Nov. 2021.
Meyers, Jeffrey. “Ginsberg’s Inferno: Dante and ‘Howl’.” Style, vol. 46, no. 1, spring 2012, pp. 89+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A300342923/LitRC?u=lincclin_ecc&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=24b782f1. Accessed 4 Nov. 2021.
Miles, Barry. Ginsberg : a biography. New York : Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Noel-Tod, Jeremy. “Ginsberg, Allen (1926–97).” The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, edited by Ian Hamilton, and Jeremy Noel-Tod, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2nd edition, 2014. Credo Reference, https://go.openathens.net/redirector/fsw.edu?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.credoreference.com%2Fcontent%2Fentry%2Foupomp%2Fginsberg_allen_1926_97%2F0%3FinstitutionId%3D1188. Accessed 07 Nov. 2021.
Raskin, Jonah. American Scream : Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. University of California Press, 2004. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=nlebk&AN=108533&site=ehost-live.
Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion : a biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Shrestha, Roma. “Howl by Allen Ginsberg: Summary and Critical Analysis.” BachelorandMaster, 31 Oct. 2013, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/howl.html.
