Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Readings, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts and Bibliography.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

By Allen Ginsberg, edited by Barry Miles / HarperPerennial, 1995, pp. 194, $17.50

Reviewed by STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Scene Editor, USA Today, and Professor of Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at San Antonio

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. . . ." This arguably most famous opening line in post-war American poetry was delivered by its 28-year-old author, Allen Ginsberg, during a now-legendary group reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on Oct. 7, 1955. Norman Podhoretz dismissed Ginsberg and the Beat movement that he led as "Know-Nothing Bohemians," and the State of California prosecuted Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Ginsberg's poem, "Howl," in a City Lights edition. In a letter to his former Columbia University student, Lionel Trilling faulted the poetry for dullness--"all prose, all rhetoric, without any music," while John Hollander reviewed Howl and Other Poems as "a very short and tiresome book."

Consisting of 127 long, ecstatic lines, the title poem was written in what Ginsberg calls "Hebraic-Melvillean bardic breath." It brings a passionate, Whitmanesque incantation to a vision of materialist America as inimical to the spirit. Against the charge that "Howl" lacked positive values, the poet insisted that his work was "an `affirmation' of individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity, etc." During the past 40 years, Ginsberg's view has prevailed, and detractors seem more and more like agents of the brutish god Moloch against whom the poet rails.

Now 69, the enfant terrible of American poetry has become, if not its elder statesman, at least an endearing, if dotty, old uncle. "Howl," which shocked early readers...