Whitman and Ginsberg: An American Literary Tradition.

Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855); Ginsberg, "Howl" (1955).    Ginsberg from around 1960.  Here's an NPR page on Howl with sound links. 

"What thoughts I have tonight of you, Walt Whitman..." ("Supermarket," l.1).

Some quotes from Whitman to consider:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you  [opening lines of Whitman's poem].

Clear and sweet is my soul . . . . and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

What living and buried speech is always vibrating here . . . . what howls restrained
         by decorum,

Who goes there! hankering, gross, mystical, nude?
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?
 
I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . . eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them . . . . no
         more modest than immodest.

THE EPIGRAPH TO "HOWL," TAKEN FROM LEAVES OF GRASS:

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

The poet Billy Collins on the impact of "Howl": "...Ginsberg's poem, his best as it turned out, was also the hand grenade that bounced into the house of formalism and lay there for a few minutes before exploding.  When the air cleared, poetry had changed for good."  "My 'Howl,'" in Jason Shinder, ed., "Howl" Fifty Years Later.