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Howl, and Other Poems
First published 1956 · 57 pages
A breathless, jazz-fueled scream against conformity that finds the sacred in the gutter.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like standing on a fire escape at 3 AM, listening to a jazz saxophone wail against the sirens of a broken city. It is a propulsive, hallucinatory rush of language that drags you through the gritty underbelly of mid-century America, only to insist that everything—even the madness, the grime, and the despair—is fundamentally holy. The rhythm is breathless and incantatory, built on long, cascading lines that demand to be read aloud until your lungs burn. It oscillates between deep, anguished lamentation and ecstatic, visionary joy. This is a book for those who crave poetry that feels less like literature and more like a raw, unfiltered transmission from the edge of human experience.
- Mood
- frenetic
- hallucinatory
- gritty
- transcendent
- Tone
- prophetic
- urgent
- ecstatic
- anguished
- rebellious
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- counterculture rebellion · spiritual yearning · madness and genius · queer sexuality · anti-conformity
- The writing
- Long, breathless, jazz-inflected lines driven by anaphora, raw imagery, and an incantatory rhythm that demands to be read aloud.
- The arc
- Moves from a despairing lament for a destroyed generation to a furious indictment of modern society, culminating in a fierce, ecstatic declaration of holy solidarity.
- Who it's for
- Readers seeking raw, unfiltered emotion, countercultural history, and poetry that burns with a manic, visionary fire.
Content notes
- drug use
- explicit sexuality
- mental illness
- profanity
- institutionalization
About the book
"The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1956 is here presented in a commemorative 40th Anniversary Edition." "When the book arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two of them were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case went to trial in the Municipal Court of Judge Clayton Horn. A parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses persuaded the judge that the title poem was indeed not obscene and that it had "redeeming social significance."" "Thus was Howl and Other Poems freed to become the single most influential poetic work of the post World War II era, with over 800,000 copies now in print."--BOOK JACKET.
Description from Open Library.
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