Howl and Other Poems.

GINSBERG, Allen.

Item Number: 128745

San Francisco: City Lights, 1959.

First edition of this principal work of the Beat Generation. Small octavo, original wrappers as issued. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the title page to fellow poet, writer and artist José García Villa, “416 E 34 St Paterson Allen Ginsberg to Jose G Villa after years.” The recipient José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as “The Pope of Greenwich Village.” He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for “the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems.” His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was “the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press.” Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. In near fine condition. Introduction by William Carlos Williams. An exceptional association.

Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California", "Transcription of Organ Music", "Sunflower Sutra", "America", "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound", and some of his earlier works. For printing the collection, the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another well-known poet, was arrested and charged with obscenity. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty of the obscenity charge, and 5,000 more copies of the text were printed to meet the public demand, which had risen in response to the publicity surrounding the trial. "Howl and Other Poems" contains two of the most well-known poems from the Beat Generation, "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", which have been reprinted in other collections, including the Norton Anthology of American Literature.