On Friday A.O. Scott reviewed the movie “Howl” by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman in the Times.
“I saw the best poems of previous generations destroyed by sanity, well-fed, calm, neatly dressed, tiptoeing through lecture halls at 10 a.m. looking for a passing grade on a term paper.
It is often the fate of the most radical works of literature to overcome scandal by becoming respectable, and this fate has hardly escaped “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg’s first published poem, a wild Whitmanian rant that has long since become a classroom staple. The wildness is still there, of course, but the apparatus of literary immortality — the paradoxical effect of which is to keep poems alive by embalming them — can make it hard to appreciate.” That’s how Scott starts his review.

Knowledge of Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” is helpful to appreciate Scott’s irony.

(“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,…”)

But Scott makes a point that goes well beyond irony. Keeping literature alive by embalming it means in reality all too often slowly suffocating literature.