To deconstruct any poem is to milk it of its sensitivity and of course its poetry. Howl fares no better than The Waste Land in this regard, and yet the era of its writing demands acknowledgment. For those of us who lived through the stifling repression of the fifties, the title of the poem was really a collective exclamation point. Like gays after Stonewall, we would never, could never go back. As Emma Long wrote in her 2012 GR review, Howl "gives a voice to those who were dissatisfied and alienated in Eisenhower's America... became an anthem for the developing counterculture..." It also freed poetry from its establishment corsets.