In many places there were treated as second class citizens.

African-Americans were not accepted into the institutions of society - schools, government, or business. It was a culture that was not accepted by white mainstream America.

Here, writing of some of the crazy and debauched acts of his friend Neal Cassady, Ginsberg tells the reader that Cassady 'leaped on negroes.' The line works in two ways because it tells of an actual event in Cassady's life, but it also represents the way in which the Beat poets leaped into African-American culture of the day. The use of African-American culture, especially jazz music, is a crucial point of 'Howl.' Ginsberg references it in the first lines of the Part I, writing of the 'Negro' streets. It is a documentary style of poetry, taking scenes and snippets from Ginsberg's own life and interweaving them with incidents of insanity and anarchy from the lives of his friends. Ginsberg reigned as the raucous poet of American hippiedom and as a literary pioneer whose freewheeling masterwork 'Howl' prevailed against government censorship in a landmark obscenity trial 50 years ago.The second half of Part I continues with many of the themes of the earlier lives. 'Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard.'-Michael McClure 'It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages.' -William Carlos Williams 'At the height of his bardic powers, Allen Ginsberg could terrify the authorities with the mere utterance of the syllable 'om' as he led street throngs of citizens protesting the Vietnam War. Howl & Other Poems is the single most influential poetic work of the post-World War II era, with over 1,000,000 copies now in print. customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trail at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the Fall of 1956.

Ginsberg poems howl