Howl (poem)

"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.

According to Ginsberg's bibliographer and archivist Bill Morgan, it was a terrifying peyote vision that was the principal inspiration for "Howl". This occurred on the evening of October 17, 1954, in the Nob Hill apartment of Sheila Williams, Ginsberg's girlfriend at the time, with whom he was living. He had the experience of seeing the façade of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in the San Francisco fog as the monstrous face of a child-eating demon. Ginsberg took notes on his nightmarish vision, and these became the basis for Part II of the poem.

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 a coffeehouse called Caffe Mediterraneum in Berkeley, California; 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 its composition, Ginsberg's therapist, Dr. Philip Hicks, had encouraged him to realize his desire to quit an unsatisfying market-research job and pursue poetry full-time, and to accept his own homosexuality. 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 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 page 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." But then 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."