This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", most famously an angry eulogy for the destruction wrought by McCarthyite fifties America: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. But he was too good a poet to settle merely for spewing bile, too much in love with the language of William Blake and Walt Whitman: to recreate the...
Posted by Andrew on October 6, 2005 9:16 PM
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