Allen Ginsberg
Quick answer: Allen Ginsberg craft guide: the long breath line, anaphora and catalogue technique in Howl. Learn how to build momentum and candour in your own poems.
When Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) read the first part of Howl aloud at San Francisco's Six Gallery in October 1955, American poetry audibly changed rooms. City Lights published the poem in 1956, US customs seized copies, and the 1957 obscenity trial that followed ended with a judge ruling the work had redeeming social importance. A generation of readers met poetry through that verdict.
Ginsberg was a Newark-born, Columbia-educated disciple of Walt Whitman and William Blake, a friend and promoter of Kerouac and Burroughs, and later a Buddhist teacher of poetics. Beneath the countercultural legend sits a technician with a very learnable toolkit: breath, repetition, catalogue and shameless specificity.
The signature moves
Move one: the breath line. Ginsberg built Howl on lines meant to be spoken in a single long exhalation, each one a complete rhetorical unit, reviving Whitman's expansive line for the postwar city. The measure is physical: your lungs are the metre.
Move two: anaphora as engine. Howl's first section hangs dozens of clauses on the repeated word who; the poem Kaddish, his elegy for his mother Naomi, drives on similar liturgical repetition drawn from the Hebrew mourning prayer. Repetition replaces plot as the structure. Move three: the catalogue with hot particulars, real streets, real friends, rooftops, asylums and supermarkets, so the visionary claims stay nailed to observed life. Move four: juxtaposed registers, sacred vocabulary pressed against industrial and bodily language, holiness asserted over the least promising objects, most explicitly in the Footnote to Howl.
What you can learn
Try composing by breath. Draft lines you can just barely say in one exhalation, and let the physical limit shape the phrasing; you will find the line acquires urgency that counted feet rarely give. Then run an anaphora drill: choose one word, who, because, tonight, and write thirty lines beginning with it, refusing to stop until the list surprises you. The good material in such exercises usually starts around line fifteen, after the obvious ideas run out.
Learn his specificity too. Ginsberg names places, dates and people, and the naming is what makes the wildness credible. And read your drafts aloud, always; his poems were scored for the voice, and yours will improve the moment you test them there.
Where to start reading
Howl and Other Poems (1956) contains Howl, A Supermarket in California, his tender night walk with Whitman's ghost, and Sunflower Sutra. Kaddish (1961), the elegy for his mother, is for many readers his greatest work. America shows the comic register, one man bickering with his country. Later, Wichita Vortex Sutra applies the method to the Vietnam era.
What poets can take from this
- Draft ten one-breath lines and read them aloud before writing more.
- Build a poem on a single repeated first word for thirty lines.
- Replace every vague noun with a named street, brand or person.
- Pair one exalted word with one ordinary object per stanza.
- Record yourself reading a draft and revise wherever you stumble.
Try it yourself
Write a poem addressed to your country, in long one-breath lines, alternating one complaint and one confession at a time, naming at least five real places or products, and ending on the most ordinary object you truly love.
Questions
Why was Howl put on trial?
US customs and San Francisco police seized the City Lights edition in 1957 on obscenity grounds. Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Howl possessed redeeming social importance, a landmark decision for literary free expression that also made the poem famous worldwide.
What poetic techniques does Howl use?
Long breath-length lines modelled on Walt Whitman, heavy anaphora with clauses hung on the repeated word who, catalogues of specific people and places, and collisions of sacred and profane vocabulary. The structure is rhetorical and musical rather than narrative.
Who influenced Allen Ginsberg?
Walt Whitman and William Blake above all, alongside William Carlos Williams, who mentored him in Paterson, and Jack Kerouac, whose spontaneous method shaped his composition habits. Buddhist practice strongly marked his later work and teaching.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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