‘Howl’ was Ginsberg’s way of mourning his mother’s detention in a mental asylum. Influences included street language, criminal argot and Judaic lore, with Ginsberg taking the mantle of a Hebraic prophet in hipster guise. His characters were ‘fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists’ his junkies ‘wandered all night with their shoes full of blood / on the snow banks of East River’, looking for warmth and a fix.

He also described, with remarkable frankness, drunkenness, drug-taking and casual sex (including homosexual sex), using language that had never before been printed in a newspaper or spoken on radio or in the cinema. Their suffering was a moral posture, a condemnation of a world gone insane through Cold War division, and rife with hypocrisy and injustice. Ginsberg chronicled the insanity, death and degradation of his Beat friends – incarcerated, murdered, exiled, starving, drug-addicted, driven beyond endurance into states of wretchedness – and presented them as holy beings made divine and transcendent through an unjust world. In the audience were Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac. On the evening of 7 October 1955, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg gathered at a gallery in San Francisco to read poetry at an event called ‘6 Poets at 6 Gallery’ (the sixth poet was either compere Kenneth Rexroth or the spirit of the late John Hoffman, whose work was read by Lamantia). San Francisco was the West Coast centre for the Beat Generation, a counterbalance to its other centre in New York.

His idiosyncratic blend of environmentalism, anarchism, socialism and artistic freedom has provided generations with inspiration his poetry, prose and polemic has impressed writers and given them the courage to follow their convictions his publications have introduced millions of people worldwide to advanced writers. He is considered its poet laureate and a great contributor to its cultural life, as a publisher, artist, activist and political renegade.

Ferlinghetti, now aged 100 and still proprietor of City Lights Bookstore and publishing house, is a seminal figure in San Francisco.

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