by Jairus Banaji

Howl is a powerful, revolutionary work. The poetry session in which it was first read late in October 1955 drew a line in the history of American literature. “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” is how the poem starts, before it catalogues the anguish of a whole generation of American youth that America actively sought “to resist, tame, jail, medicate, or hospitalize” (Vivian Gornick, “Wild at Heart”).

http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/node/1722