"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."
50 years ago today, Allen Ginsberg unleashed Howl upon the world...at the Six Gallery, an avante-garde art gallery located at 3119 Fillmore St., in San Francisco's Marina district.(see MSNBC article)
50 years ago, America was in the grips of McCarthyism and America's cultural life had been chilled by the Cold War. Conformity was the rule. The Man in the Gray Flannel suit was emblematic of the age. Creative individuality was not encouraged.
On the evening of October 7, 1955, Ginsberg was the last, and least-known, of the readers in a five-poet lineup. When he began his reading to the audience of 150 bohemian souls, he was somewhat inebriated from drinking red wine that Jack Kerouac had purchased with dimes and quarters collected from the audience. As the momentum and intensity of the poem mounted, Ginsberg was inspired by the shouts and wails of the other wine-soaked audience members, including Neal Cassady, the hero of On the Road...and to the cries of Kerouac, who exhorted Ginsberg with, "Go! Go! Go!"
When Howl concluded, the audience erupted with shock and bedazzlement. Allen Ginsberg wept. One of the audience members recalled, "In all our memories, no one had been so outspoken in poetry before."
50 years ago, Allen Ginsberg launched a literary renaissance that would change America's consciousness. With nearly 1 million copies in print, Howl is one of the most widely read poems of the 20th century.
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