Howl, for Carl Solomon. Mimeographed for the Six Gallery Reading.

Howl is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation. His influences included William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac and he attempted to speak in a spontaneous voice. The poem relates many of the stories and experiences of Ginsberg's friends and contemporaries, and is noted for its tumbling, hallucinatory style, and the frank address of sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, which was the basis for the obscenity charges. Much of his prompting in writing the poem was his sympathy for Carl Solomon, to whom he dedicated the book. Ginsberg met Solomon in a Psychiatric Hospital after he was arrested for having stolen goods in his apartment and vehicle. The poem uses the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland" as a refrain to each line in the third section. The first section of the poem immortalizes a few of Solomon's personal exploits, such as the line, "...who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy." Ginsberg admitted later this sympathy for Solomon was connected to bottled-up guilt and sympathy for his mother's schizophrenia, who had been lobotomized. When Ginsberg read the poem aloud the day of the Six Gallery reading many considered it the beginning of a new movement, and the reputation of Ginsberg and those associated with the Six Gallery reading spread throughout San Francisco. In response to Ginsberg's reading, McClure wrote: "Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America....