Howl (various sources: NAAL, Benet, Prentice Hall):

• Its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was tried and acquitted for issuing an allegedly obscene work
  • In 1957 the police seized copies of Howl and Ferlinghetti, the publisher
  • The charge was obscene and indecent writings
  • The trial made the poem and the poet famous
  • The trial ensured financial success
  • Defense at the trial: "The essence of the poem is the impression of a world in which all sexuality is confused and corrupted. The 'obscene' words indicate a corrupt sexual act. Therefore, they are part of the essence of his picture which the author is trying to give us of modern life in a state of hell."
  • The defense was deemed adequate
  • The poem was judged not to be "without the slightest redeeming social importance"
  • Ferlinghetti was acquitted
• It has a "rhapsodic, passionate, Whitmanesque view of modern corruption"
• It uses long, Whitmanesque lines which stand in sharp contrast to the tightly-wrought poetry in vogue at the time
• Long tumbling lines = accommodates the way you would think a thought = natural rhythms of thought - natural units of thought
• Celebrates the emerging counter-culture
• Denounced America's conservatism
• "The violence of the highly personal lament for American civilization was strikingly different from the quiet, measured voice of most modern poetry"
• It combined apocalyptic criticism of the dull, prosperous Eisenhower years with exuberant celebration of an emerging counter-culture
• It is called the "Birth Trauma" of the Beat Generation
• It is an experiment in what could be done with the long line, the longer unit of breath that seemed natural for him
• It is an open experimental form
• There is a strong oral emphasis
• "Howl" might indicate "animalistic" or "primitive"
• Ginsberg's "Howls" are analogous to Whitman's "Barbaric Yawps"
• It is one of the best examples of Beat poetry of the 1950s
• It is revolutionary in form and content

Structure:

• Part One -- presents these figures (the best minds) living and dying intensely in a modern hell, which in the briefer ...
• Part Two -- is denounced as the destructive product of Moloch's materialism, mechanization, and conformism
• The concluding Part Three is a lyrical address of empathy from the poet to a friend confined in a madhouse as the victim of this society

Section One:

• The main idea is stated in the first line
• The remainder of the section presents a series of descriptions of those "best minds" as they are "wandering like damned souls in hell"
• The form is a single, long, wandering sentence

Section Two:

• Attacks those aspects of modern life -- the poet identifies them as "Moloch" -- that destroy human beings and the best minds
• The form is many short exclamations = "Howls"?

Section Three:

• Is addressed to one, in a madhouse, who represents those destroyed by modern life and culture
• The form has the effect of a "refrain" (18 times)

"A Supermarket in California" (source: NAAL):

• Its movement from exclamations to sad questioning
• Is Ginsberg's melancholy reminder of what has become, after a century, of Whitman's vision of American plenty
• Its message is that America is hell (?)

"Sunflower Sutra" (source: NAAL):

• He celebrates the battered nobility beneath an industrial "skin of grime"