In 1957, Ferlinghetti went on trial for obscenity, while Ginsberg, who had left for Europe in 1956, promoted the book shamelessly everywhere he went. Customs - Ferlinghetti had contracted with British printers, hoping to circumvent censorship - and then the San Francisco police stepped in. Of all the outrageous words in the poem, it was the F-word and the S-word that drew the ire of authorities. Indeed, “Howl” practically screamed surrealism in phrases like “hydrogen jukebox” and “drunken taxi cabs.” And, beneath its raucous surface, an astute reader might also hear the cosmopolitan voice of T.S. In Hollywood, after the poet disrobed and stood naked before a shocked crowd, Anais Nin applauded him as a genius and celebrated his work as a masterpiece of surrealism. In San Francisco, where he performed it for the first time in 1955, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, proprietor of the fledgling City Lights Books, promised to publish it in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series.

Not surprisingly, Ginsberg’s poem electrified audiences everywhere. It was boldly lyrical, intensely personal, ironic, ambiguous - and very funny. It mocked the FBI, condemned “scholars of war” and, at the dawn of the age of Hugh Hefner’s suave playboy, celebrated the male sexual outlaw who made love in “empty lots & diner / backyards.” It also challenged the conventional poetry of its day. “Howl” was overtly antiwar and anti-capitalist.

It was a personal coming-out, and to the hipsters of the 1950s it announced the liberation of an entire generation. When he was done, he knew he’d created the great American poem he’d set out to write. But for nearly a year afterward, Ginsberg revised, reorganized and reshaped it, section by section, word by word. The first draft of “Howl” poured out of him. He would sing of himself and his country, with its “infernal bombs,” “industries / of night” and “dreams / of war.” Nothing would stop him, not his own “solitary craze” and certainly not the conformity of the times - the Eisenhower era, the Cold War - that seemed so antithetical to rebels with or without causes. He wanted to write an explosive, apocalyptic poem befitting the Atomic Age. In California in 1954 - the year the nation began to emerge from McCarthyism, the Korean War and legal segregation in the South - Ginsberg began to shed his New York skin and cast himself as a wild West Coast poet. It was time for him to take his rightful place, or so he thought, with Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams in the poet pantheon. His name was Allen Ginsberg, and after traveling from New York to Havana and through the jungles of Mexico, he was eager to write the great American poem. Fifty years ago, an unpublished 28-year-old American poet came into the United States at Mexicali dreaming of literary glory.

Howl by Allen Ginsberg