Ginsberg fled New York and an unsatisfac-
tory attempt at a relationship with William Bur-
roughs in 1953, and after spending nearly half a
year in Mexico, exploring the Mayan ruins and
writingSiesta in Xbalba(his first successful long
poem) he returned to the States with the inten-
tion of reuniting with Neal Cassady, who had
married and moved to San Jose ́. The reunion
was short-lived. After Carolyn Cassady walked
in on the two men in the midst of a sexual
encounter, she loaded Ginsberg into the family
car and dumped him off in San Francisco.
The city and its poetry community, as it
turned out, were the final crucial ingredients
necessary for the composition of ‘‘Howl.’’
Beat generation historians tend to employ a
kind of shorthand in delineating Ginsberg’s
early days in San Francisco: Ginsberg arrives in
town; meets a psychologist who recommends
that he give up his day job for poetry; begins a
lifelong relationship with Peter Orlovsky; writes
‘‘Howl’’ and reads it at the legendary Six Gallery
reading; and rockets to the forefront of a new
generation of poets. As Morgan shows, it wasn’t
really a quick, simple path from one point to the
next. In fact, ‘‘Howl’’ might not have been writ-
ten at all if Ginsberg hadn’t again backed himself
into a corner. After Carolyn Cassady dropped
him off in San Francisco, Ginsberg made a half-
hearted attempt at living a ‘‘normal’’ life, taking
up with a girlfriend and working a job, with
predictable results. Hewasencouraged by a psy-
chiatrist to drop the job and live an openly gay
lifestyle if that would ease his mind, but it
didn’t—not at first, at least. Peter Orlovsky,
like Neil Cassady, was essentially heterosexual,
and while he and Ginsberg agreed to maintain a
mutually exclusive gay relationship, there were
all kinds of troubles on the horizon.
Unhappy with the direction his life with
Ginsberg was taking, Orlovsky left Ginsberg in
the summer of 1955. Emotionally distraught,
uncertain where his life was going, geographically
removed from his closest friends and family, and
discouraged by his own inability to get his work
published, Ginsberg was again at a personal
crossroads. Rather than lapse into another
extended period of self-pity, he pondered the
plights of those he knew to be in similar or
worse condition—‘‘best minds’’ that had been
beaten down by society and circumstance, friends
who had died (or, worse, were walking dead);
friends who had suffered, people scarred by the
marks of woe, as Blake would have it.
His life had led him to this moment. The
long lines of the poem, which he initially entitled
‘‘Stropes’’ but then renamed ‘‘Howl,’’ were tor-
rential outpourings, one leading easily to the
next, devoted to actual events in his and his
friends’ lives. Since he had no intention of ever
publishing the work—it was too personal, as
well as being far too sexually explicit for the
times—he improvised as he went along, becom-
ing more inspired with each line. Instead of writ-
ing something bathetic, as he might have done
just a few years earlier, he chose to celebrate the
lives he was depicting in the poem. The tone of
his new work, oratorical and angry at first
glance, was actually cathartic, almost ecstatic—
proof that sympathy could unburden the spirit.
‘‘I saw the best minds of my generation,
destroyed by madness...’’He was thinking of
all the others. He was thinking of his former self.
Source:Michael Schumacher, ‘‘Prelude to a Poem,’’ in
Tricycle, Vol. 16, No. 3, Spring 2007, pp. 96–103.Vivian Gornick
In the following article, Gornick reflects on the
resemblances between Ginsberg’s poetry and
poetry by Walt Whitman.
In 1947 Saul Bellow published a novel called
The Victim,in which a derelict character named
Kirby Allbee haunts another named Asa Leven-
thal, claiming that Leventhal is responsible for
his downfall. Kirby, one of Bellow’s fabled fast
talkers—all feverish self-abasement and joking
insult—repeatedly baits Leventhal, and at one
point, when Leventhal murmurs something
about Walt Whitman, says to him, ‘‘Whitman?
You people like Whitman? What does Whitman
mean to you people?’’ Who could ever have
dreamed that less than a decade after the publi-
cation ofThe Victimnot only would ‘‘you peo-
ple’’ be announcing out loud that they liked
Whitman but it would appear that they them-
selves had reincarnated him. The day after Allen
Ginsberg’s celebrated 1955 reading of ‘‘Howl’’ in
San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent Gins-
berg a telegram that read, ‘‘I greet you at the
beginning of a great career’’—the sentence
Emerson had used writing to Whitman upon
the publication, exactly a hundred years earlier,
ofLeaves of Grass.
Fifty years later, I think it can safely be
agreed that Allen Ginsbergisthe poet who,Howl