![]() There are many people who, as Joyce Johnson says below, "fashioned their adolescent self-image on the characters". Six months after the Six Gallery reading, he wrote in his journal: "I am the greatest poet in America." Then he added: "Let Jack be greater." "Jack" was Jack Kerouac and the charged relationships between him, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady were famously fictionalised in Kerouac's novel On The Road. ![]() He may have been the most important American writer of the last century. It helped jump-start the counter-cultural revolutions of the next decade and its author was hailed as the voice of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg's poem was an incantatory epic – emotionally and sexually explicit and intent on exploding the anxieties of the atomic age. He was right, but really, the bombshell was Howl itself. ![]() The poet Gary Snyder predicted the night would be a "poetickall bomshell". ![]() W hen Allen Ginsberg performed at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco 1955, he was a fretful, unpublished poet, a man approaching his 30th birthday with a nagging sense that time was running out. ![]()
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