Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl,” his landmark 1956 poem, shortly after moving from New York City to San Francisco. Ginsberg had left New York after being released from eight months of incarceration in a psychiatric ward. This experience, along with the influence of the other writers who made up the Beat Generation, provided the conditions necessary for Ginsberg’s poem. More than anything, “Howl” is a fierce cry of lament for the decay of the American imagination. The speaker announces this theme in the poem’s famous opening line, where he declares: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” As the words “I saw” suggest, the speaker of “Howl” offers an elaborate and quasi-apocalyptic vision of an America on the verge of collapse. In particular, the speaker laments how mainstream culture has curtailed the spirit of freedom and creativity. The result is that those who most fully embody this spirit have been reduced to little more than madmen, bums, and “angelheaded” (line 3) mystics. Yet even as the speaker laments what has been lost, he also offers a celebratory prayer for all those artists, intellectuals, and activists who resist the calcifying effects of normative American morality.

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