It's difficult to describe as avant-garde any poem from as late as the 1950s. So much had already been done experimentally in verse before this that poets for the most part could only make variations on existing techniques of modernism. Yet there is nevertheless a wild, in-your-face approach by Ginsberg that can strike the reader like a wake-up call. The poem is a refutation of the somnolent quality the US culture was said to have had in the 1950s, and it presages the cultural upheaval that would occur over the next 15 years. In this sense "Howl" is a pathbreaking work, at least in its ideas if not necessarily in poetic technique.

The method of using free verse as a means of expressing untrammeled emotion had been established by Walt Whitman nearly 100 years earlier. Whitman's style, however, was dominated by a kind of naive optimism, even in his war poetry. "Howl" establishes what is nearly the total the opposite of that mood. In the opening lines, Ginsberg deals with two major subjects that had mostly been off limits, at least in the popular culture: race and drug addiction.

The manner in which the words come tumbling forth, seemingly without end, might make it easy to dismiss much of his poem as a near-psychotic rant. But the uncontrolled quality is perhaps precisely what saves the poem from becoming kitsch. The language of "Howl," or more exactly the way Ginsburg combines his words in constructing his fantastic run-on sentences, is like nothing else in poetry to this point. And the emotion is sincere.

Kitsch, on the other hand, is something of inferior quality, often a debased, conventionalized imitation of genuine art. Even if one dislikes "Howl," it is a poem that is impossible to ignore. It strikes one as a series of repeated flashes of lightning and has a destructive kind of power that is unleashed upon the reader. "Avant-garde" may not be a quite accurate label, but "Howl" is nonetheless a significant piece of artistry.