The poem’s account of down-and-out mad geniuses in New York City’s Harlem, including drug-taking, graphic sexual encounters, visions, insanity, ecstasy and desperation, poverty, and violent death, tore through the decade’s placid, proper veneer in the same way that rock and roll was erupting on the music scene and that-more quietly, but no less forcefully-Martin Luther King was emerging as a civil rights leader. It is this intersection of public and private that so resonated with readers at the time, and continues to do so in the present. Although the poem includes many personal references, it is also an indictment of social attitudes and strictures. The trial received a great deal of publicity, and made “Howl” and Ginsberg famous. Donald Allen, in his introduction to the landmark volume New American Poetry, published in 1960, described it as “The Waste Land for our age.” The poem was also the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published, based on some of its language and imagery, but after testimony from numerous literary scholars it was deemed “an important work of art,” and not obscene. Many critics consider it a breakthrough in contemporary poetry and a literary masterpiece. Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” first published in 1956, is one of the most widely read and translated poems of the twentieth century.
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