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Howl
(Allen Ginsberg)
,.
“Transgression, Release, and ‘Moloch’ ”
by Jeffrey Gray, Seton Hall University
“Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ”
(and epigraph to Ginsberg’s “Howl”)
Among the many parallels between Allen Ginsberg and his literary
forefather Walt Whitman is the fact that just as the 1881 edition
of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was banned from the mail (the U.S.
Post Office refusing to handle it), so was Ginsberg’s Howl and Other
Poems, and for the same reasons. In 1957, the second printing of Howl
was seized by customs as it came into San Francisco from England.
The ACLU contested the legality of the seizure, with the result that,
after hearing the testimony of witnesses for the defense (including
Mark Schorer, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Herbert Blau, and Kenneth
Rexroth), Judge Clayton Horn dismissed the charges, finding poet
and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti not guilty of publishing obscene
writings on the grounds that Howl was not written with lewd intent
and was not without “redeeming social importance.” By the time of
Ginsberg’s death in 1997, Howl had sold 800,000 copies, was translated
into at least 24 languages, and is today one of the best-known
of American poems.
The similarities between Ginsberg and Whitman do not stop there.
They include the two poets’ references to sexuality and the body; the
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