The Reception of Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'. Queerness and Homosexuality in the Context of 1950s' America

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Fakultät für Philologie), language: English, abstract: This paper analyzes the reception of one of the most influential poems from the post-war era, 'Howl', which was written from the perspective of a homosexual poet, Allen Ginsberg, who was living in America during the 1950s, especially focusing on his representation of queerness and homosexuality and how this portrayal shaped the future of literature. The reception of different pieces of literature has always had a strong impact on the authors of all fields and their further lives. While today, books or poems are mainly being taken off the public market when it is assumed that they would have a negative impact on the recipients, the censorship laws in the earlier years, especially during the time after the second World War, were much stricter. The removal of an author's work back then would mostly depend on the strict norms of society and if the piece of literature deviated too much from them - there was much less room for literary freedom; especially when a piece of literature portrayed themes, which were not common in society and thus not welcomed by the majority of all possible recipients.