"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection, Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.
Ginsberg began work on "Howl" in autumn of 1954. He performed the poem at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in October 1955. Fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, who attended the performance, published the work in 1956. Upon the book's release, Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and both were arrested. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene.
Although highly controversial at first, and excluded for years from the academic canon, "Howl" has gradually come to be regarded as a great work of twentieth-century American literature. The poem is also closely associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation.
Composition of the poem According to Ginsberg's bibliographer and archivist Bill Morgan, "Howl" was inspired by a terrifying peyote vision on the evening of October 17, 1954 in the Nob Hill apartment of Ginsberg's girlfriend Sheila Williams, when the façade of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in the San Francisco fog seemed as the monstrous face of a child-eating demon. Ginsberg's notes on the nightmarish vision became the basis for Part II of the poem. In the introduction Morgan says: "[F]or the last two decades of Allen Ginsberg's life, I assisted him daily as his bibliographer and archivist. During that period, I managed to track down nearly everything that he had ever published and a good deal of what had been printed about him. It was a mammoth task. Every day, as I walked to the apartment that served both as Allen's home and office, I wondered what new treasures I'd uncover. ... After I sold his archive to Stanford University for a million dollars, Allen referred everyone with questions about their papers to me" (p. xvi).
In late 1954 and 1955, in an apartment he had rented at 1010 Montgomery Street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, Ginsberg worked on the poem, originally referring to it by the title "Strophes". Some drafts were purportedly written at the Caffe Mediterraneum in Berkeley; Ginsberg had moved into a small cottage in Berkeley a few blocks from the campus of the University of California on September 1, 1955. Many factors went into the creation of the poem. Shortly before, Ginsberg's therapist Dr. Philip Hicks had encouraged him to follow his desire to quit an unsatisfying market-research job and pursue poetry full-time, and to accept his own homosexuality.James Breslin. "Allen Ginsberg: The Origins of Howl and Kaddish." Poetry Criticism. Ed. David M. Galens. Vol. 47. Detroit: Gale, 2003. At that point in his evolution as a poet, Ginsberg was experimenting with a syntactic subversion of meaning called parataxis, exemplified in the poem "Dream Record, 1955" about the death of Joan Vollmer. It was a technique that became central in "Howl".
Ginsberg showed "Dream Record, 1955" to Kenneth Rexroth, who criticized it as too stilted and academic; Rexroth told Ginsberg, "It still sounds like you're wearing Columbia University Brooks Brothers ties." Rexroth urged Ginsberg to free his voice and write from the heart. Ginsberg took this advice and attempted to write a poem with no restrictions. He was under the influence of both William Carlos Williams and his "imagist preoccupations", as well as Jack Kerouac and his emphasis on spontaneity. Ginsberg began the poem in the stepped triadic form he took from Williams but, in the middle of typing the verses, his poetic voice altered such that his own unique style (a long line based on breath organized by a fixed base) started to emerge.
The lines he wrote in this first burst of inspiration would later be included in Parts I and III of "Howl". These parts are noted for their tumbling, hallucinatory style; for relating stories and experiences of Ginsberg's friends and contemporaries; and for frankly discussing sexuality, specifically homosexuality, which subsequently provoked an obscenity trial. Although Ginsberg referred in the poem to many of his friends and acquaintances (including Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke), the primary emotional drive was his sympathy for Carl Solomon, to whom "Howl" was dedicated. He had met Solomon in a mental institution and developed a friendship with him. Ginsberg later stated that his sympathy for Solomon was connected to bottled-up guilt and sympathy for his own mother's schizophrenia (she had been lobotomized), an issue he was not yet ready to address directly.
When the poem was published in the collection, Howl and Other Poems (1956), Ginsberg's dedication stated that "Several phrases and the title of Howl" were taken from Kerouac. As confirmation of the title's origin, Ann Charters wrote in her 1973 Kerouac biography that Ginsberg mailed a draft of the poem to Kerouac in the summer of 1955. The latter liked it immensely and replied with enthusiasm, "I received your Howl." In 2008, Peter Orlovsky suggested a different origin: he told the co-directors of the film Howl that a short moonlit walk with Ginsberg—during which Orlovsky sang a rendition of the Hank Williams song "Howlin' at the Moon"—may have been the encouragement for the poem's title: "I never asked him [Ginsberg], and he never offered," Orlovsky recalled, "but there were things he would pick up on and use in his verse form some way or another. Poets do it all the time."
Performance and publication Part I of "Howl" was first performed at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco on October 7, 1955.Heidi Benson, "Howl", San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, 2005 Ginsberg had not originally intended the poem for performance. The reading was conceived by Wally Hedrick, a painter and co-founder of the Six Gallery, which was a co-op art gallery and meeting place for the Bay Area avant-garde. Hedrick approached Ginsberg in mid-1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the venue: "At first, Ginsberg refused. But once he'd written a rough draft of Howl, he changed his 'fucking mind', as he put it."
Ginsberg was ultimately responsible for inviting the other readers—Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure—and crafting the invitation. Kenneth Rexroth served as master of ceremonies. "Howl" was the second-to-last reading (before "A Berry Feast" by Snyder) and was considered by most in attendance the highlight of the evening. Many regarded it as the beginning of a new movement, and the reputation of Ginsberg and those associated with the Six Gallery reading spread throughout San Francisco. In response to Ginsberg's performance, McClure wrote: "Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America...."
In his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac gave a first-hand account of the Six Gallery performance (in which Ginsberg is renamed "Alvah Goldbrook" and the poem becomes 'Wail'):Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook was reading his poem 'Wail' drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes [Kenneth Rexroth] the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness.Within hours, Lawrence Ferlinghetti—who ran City Lights Bookstore and its associated publishing house, City Lights Books—sent Ginsberg a Western Union telegram requesting the "Howl" manuscript. The first sentence of Ferlinghetti's telegram—"I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"—repeated a famous line from Ralph Waldo Emerson's complimentary letter to Walt Whitman after Emerson had read the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Two months later, Carl Solomon gave Ginsberg permission to publish the poem.
On October 1, 1956, Howl and Other Poems was published by City Lights as number four in its Pocket Poets Series. Ginsberg had finished Part II and the "Footnote" after Ferlinghetti promised to publish. Since "Howl" and its "Footnote" were not sufficient to make an entire book, Ginsberg supplied additional poems to fill out the volume. He selected several recently written works in which he had continued experimenting with "breath-length" lines and a fixed basethe technique he began using during the composition of "Howl". Some of the "other poems" in Howl and Other Poems, such as "America", "Sunflower Sutra", and "A Supermarket in California", would become among Ginsberg's most anthologized poems.Allen, Donald M., ed. (1960). The New American Poetry, 1945–1960. Grove Press. pp. 179–182.
The earliest extant recording of "Howl" was thought to date from March 18, 1956, but in 2007 an earlier recording was found. Ginsberg had read his poem at the Anna Mann dormitory at Reed College on February 13 and 14, with the second of those dates recorded. The tape was in excellent condition and was released by Omnivore Recordings in 2021. In this recording, Ginsberg performs Part I of the poem. In the March 18 reading, in Berkeley, he performed all three parts.
Overview and structure The poem consists of 112 paragraph-like lines, which are organized into three parts, with an additional footnote.
Part I Called by Ginsberg "a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths", Part I is perhaps the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, and psychiatric patients whom he had encountered in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ginsberg refers to these people, who were underrepresented outcasts in what the poet believed to be an oppressively conformist and materialistic era, as "the best minds of my generation". He describes their experiences in graphic detail, openly discussing drug use and homosexual activity at multiple points.
Most lines in this section contain the fixed base "who". In his "Notes for Howl and Other Poems", Ginsberg writes: "I depended on the word 'who' to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention".
Part II Ginsberg says that Part II, in relation to Part I, "names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb". Part II is about the state of industrial civilization, characterized in the poem as "Moloch". Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II during a period of peyote-induced visionary consciousness in which he saw a hotel façade as a monstrous and horrible visage which he identified with that of Moloch, the Biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children.Ginsberg, Allen. "Notes Written on Finally Recording 'Howl'". Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.