SOURCE: "Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl': A Reading," in The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation, Southern Illinois University Press, 1990, pp. 50-58.

[In the following excerpt, Stephenson argues that Ginsberg's focus in "Howl" is transcendence in contemporary life.]

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 obscenity and its allusions to homosexuality, or its long-line, free-verse, open form. For these reasons "Howl" is already being relegated to the status of a literary artifact. I want to consider "Howl" as essentially a record of psychic process and to indicate its relationship to spiritual and literary traditions and to archetypal patterns.

The concept of transcendence with the inherent problems of how...