Howl by Allen Ginsberg (1956)

It opens on a wail that never pauses to apologize: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. Allen Ginsberg wrote in one long breath line, clause after clause launched from the same word, who, until the poem becomes a tidal roll-call of the dispossessed and the visionary, the junkies and saints and burning scholars America had thrown away. Then the howl turns to name its devourer: Moloch, the iron god of money and machinery, eating his own children alive. By the final movement the rage gentles into something unbearably tender, a vow shouted across the wall of a madhouse to a friend locked away inside it. You do not so much read this poem as get pulled under by it. It turned grief into incantation and obscenity into a court case, and it still sounds like a match struck against the polite silence of a whole country.