Howl and Other Poems

Allen Ginsberg

"Howl," Ginsberg's incantatory poem beginning "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," mourns the destruction of Beat Generation visionaries by a conformist American society. The collection was seized by San Francisco Customs in 1956 and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested; his 1957 acquittal in a landmark obscenity trial established that literary works of "redeeming social importance" are protected.