A Reading at the Old Gallery Six: City Lights Publishes Howl In San Francisco Changing The Literary Scene Forever

When Allen Ginsberg read Howl on October 13, l955, he not only caused a stirring inside the conventional society of the l950's by giving expression to themes that had never before been addressed; but he also changed poetry with-in the boundaries of the modern poetical landscape. Ginsberg took freeverse poetry into realms that the muse had never entered before; and gave a means of expression to a new generation of artists; hence bringing in a different spectrum of the poetic audience; helping to give more of a voice to the common man. Poetry no longer belonged solely to the Ivy league class of poets, who until the l950's had held free reign in the upper arts. By opening the classical boundaries that had limited poetic expression, the art form could be brought into mainstream culture. Free verse became a medium for this form of expression, and Allen Ginsberg became an often unwilling spokesperson for themes breaking the public mores of his day.

Due to the publicity concerning the reputation of the poem, it is sometimes easy to miss the reasons for Howl being considered such an influential poem. Stories abound concerning not only the ideas and themes operating inside of the poem; but the controversial gay lifestyle of the author Allen Ginsberg. He became rather accidentally the equivalent of a modern day Walt Whitman; walking into the mythic status of pop culture. Because of his American icon status, the importance that Howl made on the literary scene in America is sometimes underestimated. But, a careful study of the elements working inside of Howl will soon be discovered; and these false attributes are quickly discarded. Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell have stated that,

"Howl is arguably the most important American poem of the second half of the twentieth century. A chronicle of the darker side of the l950's, the poem attempts to emulate in its prosody the poet's feverish emotional state:" (1)

The authors continue to discuss the relevance of the poem further:

"The long lines alternately pound and race on, often barely pausing for breath. Prepositional phrases and lists are piled on, yet harnessed by the repetitive pronoun, which sets up a haunting, reassuring cadence. Alliteration ("angelheaded hipsters," "heavenly;" "dreams," "drugs") within lines, and liberal use of parallelism throughout the poem, also prevents the language from flying off, dissolving into unstructured prose. "Howl", in fact, is an inspired adaption of Whitman's prosody, through ts tenor, reflecting the time in which it was written, lacks Whitman's optimism. Yet it opened doors to waves of experimental writing (a spirit

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