Emily Dickinson's life and literary significance

¶ … Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg Howl

Alen Ginsberg lived a colorful life in which he participated in many of the contemporary periods subcultures. He believed that the United States had evolved into something of a materialistic society that demanded conformity and submission to cultural norms. The radicals that resisted the mainstream culture were what Ginsberg referred to as the "best minds" and they were fallen heroes in his view. The group experimented with drugs, sex, Eastern religions, anti-consumerism, and a general opposition to any kind of expression through materialism.

The poem Howl uses intense symbolism, imagery and word play throughout. The central theme of the poem seems to incorporate madness. The best minds that he envisioned were considered mad and only allowed to move freely at night. He uses a lot of variations of words to describe various aspect of the underground society that he relates to. The addicts chase a "fix" that is described as angry and beards are described as pubic hair. His phrase "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" became extremely popular and represent the anti-establishment notion of the counter-culture.

The readers in the contemporary period were likely to perceive the poem as exciting, maybe even somewhat frightening. The book won even wider attention after it wound up in court. In 1957, San Francisco authorities prosecuted Howl as obscene: The ACLU came to the book's defense, and a courtroom crowd applauded Judge Clayton Horn's decision that the book had "some redeeming social importance" and could therefore be sold[footnoteRef:1]. [1: (Burt)]