SOURCE: Stephenson, Gregory. “Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl’: A Reading.” In The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation, pp. 50-58. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Stephenson analyzes “Howl” as “essentially a record of psychic process and … its relationship to spiritual and literary traditions and to archetypal patterns.”

Where there is no vision, the people perish. 

Proverbs 29:18

Much madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. 'Tis the majority In all this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur,—you're straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain. 

Emily Dickinson, “Much Madness”

In the quarter century since its publication by City Lights Books, Allen Ginsberg's poem “Howl” has been reviled and admired but has received little serious critical attention. Reviewers and critics have generally emphasized the social or political aspects of the poem, its breakthrough use of...