Howl and Other Poems 

By Allen Ginsberg

57 pages

Originally published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights Books) in 1956

After church service, but before we were allowed to go out on Sundays, my mother required us to recite a poem she had given us the previous morning. In my early years, I memorized such poems as “The Owl and the Pussy Cat.” In my adolescent years, I was able to choose what I put to memory. They tended to be poems like “The Highwayman”by Alfred Noyes and “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

It was not until I was in college that I first read a “modern” poem. And the first one I read, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” was a life changer.

I try to read a book a week. Last week, I didn’t have time to start and finish another one. But while browsing through a bookshelf in K’s office, I came across the very copy of “Howl” that I first read in 1969. And I was delighted to discover that it had marginalia and lines that I had starred or underlined.

So you can get a feel for this poem, in case you’ve never read it, here are a few of the passages that I had highlighted…

From Part I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

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 broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and

trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in

policecars for committing no crime but their own wild

cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off

the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,

and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors,

caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love…

From Part II 

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls

and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable

dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing

in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless!

Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone

soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose

buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war!

Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is

running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!

Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose

ear is a smoking tomb!…dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking

As you may have gathered from the above excerpts, “Howl” is a bit of a confessional poem. It brims with details that are now nostalgic of Ginsberg’s life as a key figure of the Beat Generation.

He first presented “Howl” at a poetry reading at Six Gallery bookstore in San Francisco. In the audience was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow writer and co-founder of City Lights Bookstore, who went on to publish “Howl” in a small paperback. Less than two years later, Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing and selling copies of the poem, which had been deemed obscene. Though the case was widely publicized, a judge ultimately ruled that the poem displayed “redeeming social importance,” and Ferlinghetti was found not guilty. Today, it’s considered a seminal work of American literature.

I agree!