On this day in 1957, U.S. Customs agents seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl [text here] on the grounds of obscenity…, leading to a trial that October — before a judge who was a Sunday school teacher, and who had recently been in the news for sentencing five shoplifters to a screening of The Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, it was soon clear that the prosecution had little response to the long line of scholars and critics who testified to the literary importance of Howl — many comparing it in importance to Leaves of Grass – and the judge’s ruling was unequivocal:
I do no believe that “Howl” is without even “the slightest redeeming social importance.” The first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity and mechanization leading toward war. . . . It ends in a plea for holy living. . . . In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: “Honi soit qui mal y pense” [Evil to him who thinks evil]. Today in 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,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull… [more]
