The dominant trend in pre-war poetry was modernism, which emphasised the external, pictorial value of language. This underlines the poem’s artistic breakthrough. His recitation of “Howl” for Carl Solomon, a writer incarcerated alongside Ginsberg in a mental institution, is brilliant, bringing the strange, unpunctuated poem to life. The poem is performed by James Franco, who plays Ginsberg. The film is a dramatisation made from court records, recorded interviews and readings from the poem. Ten years on he was crowned king of the May Day parade by rebel students in Prague. In 1958 he joined mass anti-fascist rallies in Paris. He was there at the birth of the Beat Generation in the 1950s and 20 years later led the first hippy gathering in San Francisco.
Ginsberg was a great artist, but he also had a knack of being in the right place at the right time. “Howl”, the poem, dealt with issues such as sex – both heterosexual and homosexual – and drug use, leading Ginsberg onto a collision course with the morality of the US ruling class. Poets and socialists alike should be delighted with Howl, a dramatisation of poet Allen Ginsberg’s obscenity trial in 1957 for the collection Howl and Other Poems.
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