Chris Cummins
Staff Writer

“Howl”, the magnum opus work of poet Allen Ginsberg and the defining poem of the Beat Generation, has received the movie treatment. While the moviemay not be as critically acclaimed as the poem, Ginsberg has earned a place within the halls of seminal American poets, and his poem an enduring spot within literary criticism.

Today, viewed through the prism of a culture accustomed to MTV and Jersey Shore, the obscenity may no longer be so obscene, nor the need for expression so urgent. This is wholly untrue, to put it bluntly. While his poem may not be as exigent as it once was, it left an indelible, shocking mark on our cultural history and set himself, and those around him, on a course of collision against the American Bourgeois.

While his name and “Howl” may not be as universally revered or reviled as they once were, Ginsberg still occupies a seat among the American poets of note, and his poem a place among the most studied and revered poetic texts of the 20th century. What remains, then, is to view the poem not in context but through the prism and refraction of today’s existence, through the myopia of iPad and Xbox, and glean something of its original message, sans the obscenity.

A prophet of the Beat Generation, Ginsberg was an icon and the secular equivalent of a saint to some, and an iconoclast and anti-American subversive to others. Polarizing and immensely obscene when he felt it was required (which was often,) his prose reflected the political thought of the burgeoning Beat Generation, and of a period on the edge of crisis. “Howl”, in all its untoward starkness, was and is the best encapsulation of their disaffection with Eisenhower Americanism, and its punitive effects on their collective psyche.

Originally published in the staid year of 1955, amidst Eisenhower’s first sending of “military advisors” to Vietnam, his poem was not the first manifestation of discontent with Eisenhower America, but it was the best. Published in (where else?) Berkeley, California, he first read the poem to students at his alma mater, Reed College, and received the sort of adulation one would expect from Reed College students, the sort the praise only reserved for those witnessing literary genius, or for being extremely liberal.

As polarizing as it was, it was only a matter of time before the forces of morality rallied, and took up that great American tradition: litigation. Sued on charges of obscenity, Ginsberg was brought before a San Francisco court and pilloried by an eclectic cast of witnesses, ranging from a police officer to an English teacher, covered all the while by national media. However, in the end, defended by a number of preeminent literary experts, “Howl” was deemed of sufficient literary worth to merit publishing, and the rest is but a reaction to the much larger moral latitude bestowed by Ginsberg, if but indirectly, on the nation’s literary set.

Read today, it still retains the very same qualities that made it so very important, namely, a sense of blistering, despairing anger. An epic of angst, numbness and angry defiance, it shocked and inspired, receiving the praise of his liberal peers and the hatred of the middle class, and the battle surrounding the poem itself became an augur for the coming immensity of the cultural divide between the two. Written in an angry, raw scrawl of free verse and endless anaphora, the haunting recollections of the Beat consciousness as written by Ginsberg eventually meld into one exhausted mass of text and social alienation, yet still surprisingly retain some subtle sense of order.

Still, Ginsberg’s endless references tohis personal life grow immense, almost to the point of occluding us from discernment. His ambition and pain at times exist above our literary acumen, overreaching our knowledge of his personal life, but the sheer novelty and feeling within his prose seem to escape these prosaic coils, and are all the better because of it. The minutiae of the poem, the babble of almost crazed anger and sadness, all seem to take on a reason of their own, and almost convince us of their rationality, and of our cultural blitheness.Almost.