Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl,' first performed in 1955 and published in 1956, celebrated the marginalised bodies of the Beat generation — including those of sailors, criminals, and the sexually transgressive — in terms that engaged directly with the iconography of tattooed and modified bodies as marks of authentic experience. The poem's first section catalogues a parade of decorated, damaged, and resistant bodies as bearers of a counter-spiritual knowledge unavailable to mainstream America. Howl's trial for obscenity became a landmark case in the literary freedom of the body.

Howl's celebration of the tattooed, deviant, and marked body as locus of authentic poetic knowledge was a defining moment in American poetry's treatment of body modification as literary subject. Ginsberg's explicit linking of sexual transgression, body modification, and spiritual insight created a framework that subsequent confessional and performance poets built upon directly. The poem's long-term influence on slam poetry, spoken word, and the poetry of queer embodiment — all traditions deeply engaged with the politics of the decorated body — is incalculable.