SOURCE: Leddy, Michael. “Verse.” World Literature Today 61, no. 4 (autumn 1987): 630-31.

In the following essay, Leddy reviews a thirtieth-anniversary facsimile edition of “Howl.”

“It is a rare occasion when a living author illuminates the creative process behind his work,” says the dust jacket of the thirtieth-anniversary annotated facsimile edition of Howl. For once a dust jacket is guilty of understatement: the generosity with which Ginsberg illuminates his text is unprecedented. He and editor Barry Miles have assembled all significant drafts of the poem, reproduced with copious new annotations by Ginsberg concerning composition and revision, influences, literary allusions, and topical references. In addition, there are numerous photographs, several essays by Carl Solomon (to whom Howl is dedicated), a selection of letters (by Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Williams, and others), accounts of the 1955 first reading and the 1957 obscenity trial, and Ginsberg's selection of influential poems by Smart, Shelley, Apollinaire, Crane, and other...