The year is 1955. The Fonz is blasting “Rock Around the Clock” on the jukebox and the McFlys are going steady thanks to a confused teen with a tricked-out DeLorean. Greasers and poodle skirts abound. America is prosperous, the middle class is enormous, suburbia is ubiquitous and, aside from the constant looming threat of global nuclear annihilation, life really couldn’t get more swell.
That is, if you’re white, straight, and sober. Never you mind the repression, segregation, homelessness, and suicide, the alcoholism, heroin, peyote and Benzedrine, the criminalized homosexuality and anonymous intercourse in the park, the madness, strait jackets, shock therapy and unconsenting lobotomies – and, of course, the censorship that tried to keep it all under wraps.
On the evening of October seventh, in an art gallery in San Francisco, a then-unknown Allen Ginsberg gave his first performance of “Howl,” a sprawling ode to the forgotten and discarded members of his generation. In it, he chronicled the exploits, excesses, and radical leftist leanings of a counter-culture movement that railed against tightly-laced 1950’s materialism. Dedicated to his friend Carl Solomon, with whom Ginsberg spent eight months in a mental institution, the poem also had a heavy undercurrent of insanity – though, at a time when hiding under a desk was considered a good defense against an atomic bomb, the question as to whose remains wide open.
Still more controversially, Ginsberg spoke explicitly about sex – of the heterosexual, homosexual, makeshift, and marathon varieties. Considering that it would still be another year before Elvis startled the world with his “suggestive” Ed Sullivan performance, it’s no surprise that the man who published “Howl” was arrested and charged with obscenity in 1957 – in a case which he won by proving that the poem had “redeeming social importance.”
“[Howl]” has since earned a position alongside Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as one of the most emblematic works of the Beat Generation, which would go on to inspire the hippie movement during the Vietnam War. The past five decades have not, however, diluted any of the poem’s potency; in 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the censorship trial, a New York radio station scheduled to air “Howl” was forced to cancel the reading under threat of huge obscenity fines. **** that.
Shmoop is an online study guide for English Literature, Poetry and US history. Its content is written by Ph.D. and Masters students from top universities, like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale who have also taught at the high school and college levels. Teachers and students should feel confident to cite Shmoop.
