In 1957, an obscenity trial was brought against Howl's publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, based on the poem's homosexual content. The accounts of Kerouac passing round jugs of wine and shouting 'Go! Go! Go!' throughout the Six Gallery reading certainly make it sound ecstatic. The poet Michael McClure wrote that with Howl, 'a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases'. There will be even more of them now that Ginsberg is being brought to the screen: the new film Howl tells the story of the poem and subsequent obscenity trial, with James Franco as an uncannily good and enormously sympathetic Ginsberg. 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W hen Allen Ginsberg performed at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco 1955, he was a fretful, unpublished poet, a man approaching his 30th birthday with a nagging sense that time was running out.

Howl and another poem