Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

Howl was probably the most widely read and significant piece of poetry to come out of the Beat movement.

Certain lines in the poem were 'obscene' and so the poem was targeted for censorship. There was a huge scandal in which Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of the City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Book, was brought to trial for obscenity. If a jury found the poem to be obscene, then Ferlinghetti could face jail time, and the poem would be taken off the shelf.

Much in the same fashion that police brutality against Occupy Wall St. protesters caused the movement to spread like wildfire, as it got it national attention, many people, including Ginsberg himself, question whether the poem would have become so successful and Ginsberg so famous if the poem hadn't been targeted for censorship.


There are parts of the peome which directly intersect with things that happen in On The Road. Both pieces of literature are semi-autobiographical, and both authors knew eachother, so it's interesting to look for moments of overlap.
Here are a few of the verses that are examples of such overlap:

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the               morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and nake in the lake, 
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, Neal Cassady, secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too

And,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes