Editing Howl (poem) (section)

===Part I===
Called by Ginsberg "a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths", Part I is perhaps the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political [[Political radicalism|radicals]], [[jazz]] musicians, [[drug addiction|drug addicts]], and psychiatric patients whom he had encountered in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ginsberg refers to these people, who were underrepresented outcasts in what the poet believed to be an oppressively conformist and materialistic era, as "the best minds of my generation". He describes their experiences in graphic detail, openly discussing drug use and homosexual activity at multiple points.

Most lines in this section contain the fixed base "who". In his "Notes for ''Howl'' and Other Poems", Ginsberg writes: "I depended on the word 'who' to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention".<ref name="Notes_for_Howl"/>