Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl opens with the famous image of “angelheaded hipsters.”
The poem was first performed publicly at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955. City Lights published Howl and Other Poems in 1956, with an introduction by William Carlos Williams. Its frank treatment of sexuality, mental illness, drugs, poverty, and spiritual longing made it one of the most influential American poems of the postwar period.
The opening section begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” before introducing the poem’s “angelheaded hipsters.” That line is sometimes remembered independently from the title, leading readers to confuse the poem with Ginsberg’s other major works.
Howl also became the subject of a landmark obscenity case after customs officials seized copies of the City Lights edition. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled in favor of the poem’s literary value in 1957.