I saw the best minds of my generation

[ET Awful]

destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York . . . .


(I'm going from memory here folks, so you'll have to look up HOWL by Ginsberg on your own for the rest, as it's a tad too long to post in its entirety :))

[Locut0s]

1. W.H. Auden: September 1, 1939

W.H. Auden: September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

[teach1st]

2. angelheaded hipsters

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

That always floors me...

[ET Awful]

3. I was always more partial to

who were expelled from the academies for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,


I just loved the phrase "windows of the skull" :)

[teach1st]

4. I met Alan Ginsburg...

..as a lad sitting next to him chanting at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami.



I was high. He said something about my third-eye and tapped me on the forehead.

[ET Awful]

5. Cool :)

He was certainly an odd one.

A genius, but an odd duck :)

[saltpoint]

6. On the damn tv these past few days --

-- football games and parades.

On your recent posts here on DU, Corso and Ginsberg.

Give me Allen and Gregory any day over the halftime shows and Rose Bow parade.

How good that you posted these. Thank you.

[velvet]

7. I love to read "Howl" aloud

to anyone who'll sit still long enough to listen. Love its rhythms, waves that build and ebb and build again, and the crescendo at the "Moloch! Moloch!" bit. Of the many standout lines and phrases I am fondest of the very simple "boxcars, boxcars, boxcars". I can't see a goods train go by without thinking of it, it captures the sight and sound so perfectly.

That's a great Auden, LocutOS.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

... most apt, reads like a description of the DU.