Howl - by Alan Ginsberg

"Howl", a poem written by Allen Ginsberg as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems, set the stage for the contemporary American culture we know today. The poem is considered to be one of the seminal works of the Beat Generation along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), and Gregory Corso's "Gasoline" "(1958).

"Howl" was originally written as a performance piece, but it was later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books.

The poem was originally considered to be obscene, and Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged with its publication. That’s right, just over fifty years ago a guy went to jail in the United States for publishing a poem.  On October 3, 1957 Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, and "Howl" went on to become the most popular poem of the Beat Generation.

Howl / Part 1
For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw mohammedan angels staggering on tene ment roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy& publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,

illuminating all the mo tionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook lyn Bridge,

lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind ings and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand father night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,