That is not to say, however, that Ginsberg’s
poem has lost its ability to shock. In 2007, fifty
years after Judge Horn’s ruling that the poem
was not obscene, the New York radio station
WBAI decided not to broadcast a recording of
‘‘Howl,’’ fearing that the Federal Communica-
tions Commission would judge it obscene and
fine the station $325,000 for each word deemed
offensive.
From the late 1970s, Ginsberg’s own status
has risen from young outsider of the Beat gen-
eration to major American poet, and ‘‘Howl’’ has
increasingly been considered one of the most
influential and innovative poems of the modern
era. Part I has been included in its uncensored
form in theNorton Anthology of American Liter-
aturesince 1979.
Nevertheless, critics are divided in their esti-
mation of ‘‘Howl’’ and of Ginsberg. Some accuse
Ginsberg of having achieved fame by virtue of
his charismatic persona and political activism, as
opposed to his poetic talent. John Hollander, in
his 1957 review ofHowl, and Other Poemsin the
Partisan Review(reprinted in the facsimile edi-
tion of the poem) is contemptuous of the ‘‘utter
lack of decorum of any kind in [Ginsberg’s]
dreadful little volume,’’ which the poet and critic
terms ‘‘very tiresome.’’ He adds that ‘‘Howl’’
‘‘[sponges] on one’s toleration, for pages and
pages.’’ Nevertheless, Hollander concedes that
Ginsberg has ‘‘a real talent and a marvelous ear.’’
Paul Zweig, on the other hand, writing well
after the onset of the Beat phenomenon in a 1969
Nation article, recognizes the breakthrough
achieved by the poem’s frankness: ‘‘What Gins-
berg forced us to understand in ‘Howl’...was
that nothing is safe from poetry.’’ Calling Gins-
berg a ‘‘shaman’’ (in tribal culture, a person who
acts as an intermediary between the natural and
supernatural worlds), Zweig says that Ginsberg
has learned, in his psychic journeys, the ‘‘demand-
ing truth’’ expressed by the sixteenth-century
French writer Michel de Montaigne: ‘‘I am a
man, and nothing human is foreign to me.’’
Related to Ginsberg’s humane inclusiveness,
perhaps, is that quality of ‘‘kindness, or loving-
kindness,’’ identified in his poetry, as well as in his
character, by the poet and critic Alicia Ostriker in
herAmerican Poetry Reviewessay titled ‘‘‘Howl’
Revisited: The Poet as Jew.’’ (Notably, Ginsberg
was raised in a secular Jewish family.) Ostriker
points out in her essay that this quality of
‘‘lovingkindness,’’ known aschesedin Hebrew,
is one of the thirteen features of God according
to the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses
Maimonides. Indeed, at the end of the ‘‘Footnote
to ‘Howl,’’’ Ginsberg hails the kindness of the
soul as the quality that redeems humanity from
the hell imposed by Moloch. Ostriker further
argues in her essay that the power and virtue of
the dispossessed and injured are the great themes
both of Yiddish literature and of ‘‘Howl.’’
When Ginsberg died in 1997, Wilborn Hamp-
ton noted in hisNew York Timesobituary that the
poet ‘‘provided a bridge between the Underground
and the Transcendental.’’ Hampton cites J. D.
McClatchy, a poet and the editor of theYale
Reviewas saying of Ginsberg that he was ‘‘as
much a social force as a literary phenomenon.’’
Likening Ginsberg to Walt Whitman, McClatchy
says,‘‘Hewasabardintheoldmanner—outsized,
darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer,
part rant. His work is finally a history of our
era’s psyche, with all its contradictory urges.’’Criticism.
Claire Robinson
Robinson has an MA in English. She is a teacher of
Englishliteratureandcreativewritingandafree-
lance writer and editor. In the following essay, Rob-
inson explores how Ginsberg’s ‘‘Howl’’ embodies
spiritual values.
Allen Ginsberg wrote in the tradition of
nineteenth-century American transcendentalist
poets and writers such as Henry David Thoreau,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman.
Transcendentalism began as a protest against
the rationalism and materialism that dominated
the universities and mainstream society of the
day and against the doctrines of organized reli-
gion. At the center of transcendentalist philosophy
was a pure state of spirituality that transcends the
material world and that is accessible only
through the direct mystical experience of the
individual, rather than through the doctrines
of established religions. The movement had
much in common with the Beat movement,
including rebellion against conventional society
and a conviction regarding the centrality of
personal spiritual experience.
Whitman’s poetry collectionLeaves of Grass
(1855) was a major influence on ‘‘Howl,’’ both in
its long-line, free-verse form and in its uninhib-
ited joy in the senses at a time when suchHowl