Howl: The Failed Censorship

-Judge Clayton Horn, San Francisco, 1957

Prolific, provocative, and revealing of its time. A shot rang out and America’s counter culture came running. The shot was fired by Allen Ginsberg, a poet and a prophet of his time musing about the ills of society in his poem entitled “Howl.” With this culturally shocking composition came a paramount urge to censor it using any means necessary. This single poem sparked a cataclysm in the fiber of American society that has resulted in the expressionistic freedom that we experience at present. Its words and their meanings sparked immense discussion ranging from disdain to total envelopment.

In the Fall, of 1955 at a coffee house in San Francisco called the Six Galler,. Allen Ginsberg had organized a poetry reading in which fellow poet Kenneth Rexroth wass to read and introduce five other poets including Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, Snyders and Phillip Whalen. At the tail end of the poetry reading Allan Ginsberg took center stage to give the first reading of “Howl” - a work he wrote two months prior. Jack Kerouac was there passing around jugs of wine which he had ge

nerously brought to add to the mood of the gathering. Ginsberg began with the opening lines:

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…”

I chose to research the censorship of “Howl” because I have always felt a kindred connection to the writers, artists and musicians of the Beat Generation. They seemed to know what no one else knew and appeared to be at least one step ahead of the rest of American society. They fought revolutionary wars against the fascists when no one seemed to care and they fled to far off European countries when no one seemed to understand. Their own country persecuted them for speaking their individual truths. Throughout all this, their spirit for freedom of expression allowed them to endure and create a legacy that all of us take part in everyday. This is my passion because I see an alarming regression in the approach our country is taking towards civil liberty infringements. “Howl” was not written in vain nor was it fought for in vain. It was written during a time of fear, fear of world wars, fear of communism, and fear of a human’s capacity to stir up greatness with just a few pages of poetry. The latter so clearly took us out of our fear and I am puzzled as to why the same type of blacklisting is occurring at present.

“Who let themselves be******in the ***by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.”

The issue of “Howl’s” censorship began on March 25, 1957 (Tytell 1976). The first fifteen hundred copies went out without a hitch. When the next batch of three thousand copies, sent from England, reached the U.S. Customs office in San Francisco, five hundred copies were seized by a Customs official. This official indignantly declared that “the words and the sense of the writing is obscene”, and, “you wouldn’t want your children to come across it” ( Tytell 1976). That was the exact moment in which “Howl” hit the proverbial censorship fan. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the aforementioned publisher of “Howl”, was prepared for this and promptly notified the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asking them to come to his defense if he needed (Tytell 1976). He indeed ‘needed’.

In the transcripts from the trial, McIntosh asked Schorer what “angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” meant. Shorer responded by insisting that one cannot translate poetry into prose. The following is recorded in the same line of questioning ( taken from Beat Writers at Work 1999) :

Some topics in this essay:
Judge Horn, Ralph Brown, Joseph McCarthy, Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg’s, Lights Bookstore, California Ginsberg’s, Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco, tytell 1976, judge horn, george-warren 1999, clayton horn, san francisco, schrecker 1994, word choices, ginsberg’s word choices, allan ginsberg, ralph mcintosh, written fear, starry dynamo machinery, hipsters burning ancient, judge clayton horn, people lost jobs,