1. The Beat Generation
• Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956)
• Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957)
• William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959)

2. ‘Beat Generation’
• Kerouac coined the phrase ‘Beaten
Generation’ in 1948
• ‘beat’ originally meant ‘tired’ or ‘beaten
down.’
• November 1952 publication of a quasi-
manifesto, ‘This is the Beat Generation’, by
John Clellon Holmes in the New York Times
Magazine:

3. ‘This is the Beat Generation’
‘Any attempt to label an entire generation is
unrewarding, and yet the generation which went
through the last war, or at least could get a drink
easily once it was over, seems to possess a
uniform, general quality which demands an
adjective ... The origins of the word 'beat' are
obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most
Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies
the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It
involves a sort of nakedness of
mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being
reduced to the bedrock of consciousness...’

4. • Poetry reading in October 1955 at Six
Gallery, SF, brought together East-Coast writers like
Allen Ginsberg with West Coast poets.
• ‘galvanised media interest in a variety of alternative
poetries’ (critic Paul Hoover)
• Showed how poetry was linked to public performance at a
time when prevailing idea was that it was a contemplative
and private relationship to the page.
• Fictionalised by Kerouac in The Dharma Bums
• ‘a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body
had been hurled against the harsh wall of America’
(McClure)

5. • Wide range of poetic influences, inc.
Whitman, Blake, Pound, Williams
• Influence of Surrealism, Eastern/ Buddhist
philosophy
• Jazz and Blues – unpredictability and
spontaneity in the poetry
• The Beats responded to and rejected the
alienating social and political ideals of Cold
War America

6. ‘Quintessential features of this ideology include
the attributing of superior value to the individual
rather than the collective; the subjective rather
than the objective; the irrational rather than the
rational; innocence rather than experience.’
John Osborne, ‘Beat aesthetics’ Oxford
Companion

7. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Howl and other Poems (1956)
• 1957 publisher (and poet) Lawrence
Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing and
selling an obscene book.
• The subsequent obscenity trial brought
national attention to Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti’s
‘City Lights’ Bookstore, & the whole Beat
movement. ‘Howl’ became a bestseller.
• Paperback format itself could symbolise
subversion:

8. ‘Ferlinghetti’s bookshop sells no hardcovers, but
it does stock all the quarterlies, all the soft-cover
prestige lines of the major publishers, a lot of
foreign imprints and periodicals, and just about
every other sort of pocket book except the kind
whose bosomy covers leer from the racks of
drugstores and bus terminals.’
Journalist David Perlman, covering the
obscenity trial of Howl and Other Poems

9. ‘Howl’ the poem
• 1949 Ginsberg met poet Carl Solomon in the
Psychiatric Institute of New York.
• French playwright Antonin Artaud’s inverted
concept of artist. Artist seen as mad by a mad
society is in fact sane.
• First and third sections drawn from Solomon’s
stories.
• Solomon later declared much of his testimony
had been false.

10. ‘ I thought I wouldn’t write a poem, but just
write what I wanted to without fear, let my
imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic
lines from my real mind – sum up my life –
something I wouldn’t be able to show
anybody, write for my own soul’s ear and a few
other golden ears.’
Ginsberg, ‘Notes for Howl and other poems’

11. Structure of Howl
Part 1: the longest part is a catalogue of people, ‘the best minds of
my generation’, organized round the fixed base of ‘who’: within
each strophe the ‘who’ is elaborated on and extended with events
and other details. Occasionally the fixed base is abandoned for
supplementary or contrastive material.
Part 2: this section answers its own opening rhetorical question in
strophes based on the term ‘Moloch,’ the ‘vision of the
mechanical feelingless inhuman world we live in and accept.’
Part 3: this direct address to Carl Solomon is organized by the
base ‘'I’m with you in Rockland.’ Each strophe is slightly longer
than the previous one until a climax is reached with a series of
apostrophes: ‘O…’ followed by a one-strophe coda.
Part 4: this ‘footnote’ is based on the word ‘holy’: initially the
organization is irregular, but settles on a spatially marked series of
strophic affirmations.

12. ‘coarse and vulgar language’
‘redeeming social importance’

13. Howl obscenity trial
Ferlinghetti defended Ginsberg’s poetry during
the trial by claiming that American Society was
obscene, rather than the poet.
Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the book was not
obscene because it offered work of ‘redeeming
social importance’, despite its ‘coarse and vulgar
language’ and presentation of ‘unorthodox and
controversial ideas.’