What does 'the wasteland' mean? (Lol - joke)
- How has it been interpreted?
- What are some of the key features?
- In what ways has it been influencial?
Post Modernism
- What common qualities do 'the beats' share?
- How is beat poetry linked to rap?
- How has Bob Dylan's 'Masters of war' involved in controversy during the Bush administration?
- On what ground was 'howl' accused of being obscene - grounds for the defence?
- What kind of protest song/rap or other media have come out in the last decade? Is there a spirit of protest anymore?
On
what grounds was ‘howl’ accused of being obscene? – Grounds for the defence
Ginsberg’s ‘howl’ was written in a San Francisco apartment in
the summer of 1955. The creation of this poem sparked a lot of controversy
which lead to a court case where it was then ruled as obscene. In support of
the trial, there testimonies given from “nine literary experts who spoke out in favor of
the poem’s merits” (Chandler, 2012) City Lights Books were the
publishers of this text and were later prosecuted. Brown (2011).
Ginsberg’s ‘howl’ was accused for being obscene for a number
of reasons. “Howl is a rage against conformity, inhibition, censorship, puritanism,
and everything else that restricts and limits the realization of one's true
self.”
(Sederberg, n.d.). Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled this very poem as not obscene and
stated his reason why. He said that the poem had “redeeming social importance” regardless of the
fact that it mentions sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll which were all argumentative
at that particular time period. (Chandler, 2012 - quoted Horn)
The first couple of lines of the poem is enough, well for me,
to get the reader’s attention. After reading this poem, I thought that it
literally was a howl! A howl from a writer’s perspective of being in the so
called ‘land of the free’, having rights such as freedom of speech and what
not, and then later having your own poems marked as obscene! All he was trying
to do was voice his opinion about political and cultural conservatism that had
“destroyed the best mind of ‘his’ generation” (Ginsberg, 1956).
Brown, M. (2011). Allen
Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’: ‘I scribbled magic lines from my real mind’ – Telegraph.
Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8333075/Allen-Ginsbergs-Howl-I-scribbled-magiclines-from-my-real-mind.html
Chandler, A. (2012). Looking
Back at ‘Howl’ and the obscenity Trial – Tablet Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/113218/howl-and-the-obscenity-trial
Ginsberg, A. (1956). Howl
andOother Poems. San Francisco.
Sederberg, James. (n.d.). The
Howl Obscenity Trial – FoundSF. Retrieved from http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Howl_Obscenity_Trial
Hey Sam, I never had heard of Ginsberg before and after reading your post I checked out a video on him reading Howl and it was very interesting. He does seem to be able to get the attention of his audience in the first few sentences .I think listening to him reading Howl is more interesting than reading the poem as it adds more meaning to the poem.
ReplyDeleteHey Sam,
ReplyDeleteHowl was actually deemed obscene BEFORE the court case. It was the court case that cleared Ginsberg and eventually got the book back on the shelves.
Regardless though, you've raised some good points about it. It does seem to weird now that there could be a way of reflecting on life that would require government intervention. You know, if one of us wrote a poem about the "best minds of our generation" I can't imagine anyone really caring much, let alone the government, especially to take it far enough to be banned. Personally, I'm glad we live in an age where we can say what we want. But, on the other hand do you think we've lost something, that somehow ideas are now less powerful?