Allen Ginsberg is a very popular and well-known contemporary poet today. He was born in 1926 in Newark, NJ and received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1948 and was the recipient of numerous honors and awards during his lifetime including: the Woodbury Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Award for Poetry, NEA grants and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Ginsberg had a desire to attain the mystical and as he would say, "the metaphysical poets of the nineteenth century were perhaps his greatest influence." It was the desire to expand the mind and reach the spiritual that inspired Ginsberg to experiment with substances such as marijuana and Benzedrine. He claimed that he was under the influence of drugs while writing the poem "Howl".
The poem "Howl," by Allen Ginsberg is a poem that evokes emotion and social awareness of the "illness" and "madness" of the people and the American society. Ginsberg's poem is divided into three parts, and each part of the poem elicits a different kind of emotion and focus; the three parts wherein the poem is divided also addresses and talks about a different kind of audience, while consistently extending the message of "madness" (in the literal and social sense) and with the issue of social strife and chaos within and among the members of the American society. The scenario Ginsberg presents in his poem is a reflection of the social and political strife that the American society had experienced during the post - Vietnam War era.
In the first part Ginsberg uses a Walt Whitman style of writing, the use of free verse in long rhythmical lines with natural, organic structures. This is the longest and most powerful, an angry prophetic lament. It's cataloging of real and surreal images that creates a movement that is rushed, frenzied, yet is filled with gaps and wild illuminations; the poem begins by immersing us in the extremities of modern urban life, overwhelming and flooding us with sensations.
