Conformity and Challenges in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Years 381called them “angelheaded hipsters,” a phrase that would resonate and bring
meaning to the words “hip” that would be used with great frequency in the
Sixties. Howl, often derided as a poem about drugs and sex, was a social state-
ment, a manifesto of sorts about the ill effects of industrial society and nucle-
ar war, and with frequent reference to “Moloch,” a demonic symbol, to rep-
resent U.S. military-industrial society.
The final part of the poem is somewhat autobiographical, in that Ginsberg
represents his stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949. In so many ways, he broke
the conventions of poetry and gave meaning to a new school of writing, and
a new lifestyle–Beat, which gave rise to the term Beatnik to describe those
immersed in that counterculture. To be a “Beat” or to be “beat” meant one
was unhappy with so-called decent middle-class values [which tended to be
class-oriented, racist, sexist and conservative]. It also connoted that people
who were outside the mainstream were “beatific,” or blessed and at peace. If
a work of art or piece of music was “beat,” it moved you, made you think of
life in a different, more creative way. Ginsberg’s poetry was most definitely
“beat!” And Howl was as controversial as it was important. It was a long
poem, at times a rant about American society, politics, and sexuality. Ginsberg
wrote about illegal drug use and sex, both straight and gay, and based on that
customs officials seized over 500 copies of the book as it was being unloaded
on the docks upon arrival from printers in London. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a
poet himself who owned City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, a hot spot for
countercultural types, was charged with obscenity, but was found not guilty
by a judge who deemed that the poem had “redeeming social importance.”
This would be one of the legacies of the Beat generation–they pushed the
limits of what was legally and socially acceptable, and made their rejection
of conformity and traditional values part of the literary canon of the
American arts. No one can study postwar literature or poetry any longer
without encountering “The Beats.” Howl was not Ginsberg’s only major,
controversial work; at about the same time he published “America,” which
was most certainly did not state his patriotic admiration of the U.S– “America
I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing... /I can’t stand my own mind/
America when will we end the human war?/Go fuck yourself with your
atom bomb/I don’t feel good don’t bother me.” Ginsberg was probably the
prototype “Beat” of the era. While critics then, and now, would deride
Beatniks as simply cultural outcasts, the Beat Movement was inherently