Whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, Yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, We can talk about what it means later first just listen to the rhythms of the rolling, crashing words: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,ĭragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,Īngelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night …Īnd so on for a long time.

The lines in the famous first part of the poem tumble over each other in long unbroken breaths, all adding to a single endless sentence: The poem is part Walt Whitman, part Old Testament hellfire ranting, and one-hundred-percent performance art. It was Allen Ginsberg’s first public performance, and it made him instantly famous at the age of twenty-nine. The first of these readings took place in October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. ( William Carlos Williams, Introduction to ‘Howl and Other Poems’)Īllen Ginsberg’s monumental poem was first heard in a series of famous readings that signaled the arrival of the Beat Generation of writers. ‘Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell’

(an elocution teacher, at the obscenity trial for ‘Howl’) I didn’t linger on it too long, I assure you.’ ‘You feel like you are going through the gutter when you have to read that stuff.

Howl and other poems first edition