In the Paul Blackburn Tape Archive at the University of California, San Diego, Ginsberg can be heard reading early drafts of his poem to his fellow writing associates.

Ginsberg had the terrifying experience of seeing the façade of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in the San Francisco fog as the monstrous face of a child-eating demon.

A short time before the composition of "Howl", Ginsberg's therapist, Dr. Philip Hicks, encouraged him to realize his desire to quit his market-research job and pursue poetry full-time and to accept his own homosexuality.

[7][8][9] He experimented with a syntactic subversion of meaning called parataxis in the poem "Dream Record: June 8, 1955" about the death of Joan Vollmer, a technique that became central in "Howl".

[citation needed] It is noted for relating stories and experiences of Ginsberg's friends and contemporaries, its tumbling, hallucinatory style, and the frank address of sexuality, specifically homosexuality, which subsequently provoked an obscenity trial.

And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook was reading his poem 'Wail' drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go!

Called by Ginsberg "a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths", Part I is perhaps the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, and psychiatric patients whom he had encountered in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Ginsberg refers to these people, who were underrepresented outcasts in what the poet believed to be an oppressively conformist and materialistic era, as "the best minds of my generation".

In "Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl", Ginsberg writes, "I depended on the word 'who' to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention".

Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II during a period of peyote-induced visionary consciousness in which he saw a hotel façade as a monstrous and horrible visage which he identified with that of Moloch, the Biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children.

Ginsberg says of Part II, "Here the long line is used as a stanza form broken into exclamatory units punctuated by a base repetition, Moloch.

It is directly addressed to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949; called "Rockland" in the poem, it was actually Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute.

"[22] The frequently quoted and often parodied[23][24][25][26][27][excessive citations] opening lines set the theme and rhythm for the poem: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, Ginsberg's own commentary discusses the work as an experiment with the "long line".

[29] On June 3 Shig Murao, the bookstore manager, was arrested and jailed for selling Howl and Other Poems to an undercover San Francisco police officer.

[30] Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case when California State Superior Court Judge Clayton Horn decided that the poem was of "redeeming social importance".

An account of the trial was published by Ferlinghetti's lead defense attorney Jake Ehrlich in a book called Howl of the Censor.

[citation needed] A Liberal People's Party member of the Finnish Parliament, Arne Berner, heard the broadcast, and started an interpellation, addressed to the Minister of Transport and Public Works.

[36] Also, a report of an offence was filed to the criminal investigation department of Helsinki police district because the obscenity of the poem allegedly offended modesty and delicacy.

The report was filed by Suomen kotien radio- ja televisioliitto (The radio and television association of Finnish homes), a Christian and patriotic organization, and it was only based on the six-line fragment.

[citation needed] Finally, the Ministry of Transport and Public Works considered in December 1969 that the broadcast of "Howl" contravened the licence of operation of Yleisradio: it was neither educational nor useful.

The result of Eberhart's visit was an article published in the September 2, 1956 New York Times Book Review titled "West Coast Rhythms".

Eberhart's piece helped call national attention to "Howl" as "the most remarkable poem of the young group" of poets who were becoming known as the spokespersons of the Beat generation.

[88] On October 7, 2005, celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the first reading of the poem were staged in San Francisco, New York City, and in Leeds in the UK.

[89][90] In late August 2007, Ron Collins, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters, Bill Morgan, Peter Hale, David Skover, Al Bendich (one of Ferlinghetti's lawyers in the 1957 obscenity trial), and Eliot Katz petitioned Pacifica Radio to air Ginsberg's Howl on October 3, 2007, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the verdict declaring the poem to be protected under the First Amendment against charges of obscenity.

The station chose instead to play the poem on a special webcast program, replete with commentary (by Bob Holman, Regina Weinreich and Ron Collins, narrated by Janet Coleman), on October 3, 2007.