Howl and Other Poems Reading Order

Howl and Other Poems (1956) by Allen Ginsberg is one of the most important poetry collections in American literary history — the book that launched the Beat Generation into public consciousness and was, briefly, the subject of an obscenity trial that became a landmark case for the freedom of literary expression. The title poem, 'Howl', opens with one of the most famous lines in American poetry: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked' — and proceeds in three long sections to mourn the casualties of the conformist 1950s, rage at 'Moloch' (the industrial-capitalist system that destroys the human), and celebrate Carl Solomon (a friend met in a mental hospital) as a kind of sacrificial victim of American normality. Ginsberg wrote 'Howl' under the influence of William Blake and Walt Whitman, both of whom he claimed had visionary experiences; the long Whitman-influenced lines and the prophetic first-person stance are direct inheritances. He first read it at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in October 1955, in a performance that Jack Kerouac described as the founding event of the Beat Generation. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published the poem in his City Lights Pocket Poets series, was arrested for obscenity in 1956; his acquittal the following year established a legal precedent for the publication of sexually explicit literary work. The collection also contains 'A Supermarket in California', 'America', and 'Sunflower Sutra' — all essential Ginsberg — and 'Kaddish', his elegy for his mother, is the companion poem written a few years later.