It's more than half a century since Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl landed like a bombshell in the staid world of 1950s America. But what was the poet really like? Friends and colleagues remember him

When Allen Ginsberg performed at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco 1955, he was a fretful, unpublished poet, a man approaching his 30th birthday with a nagging sense that time was running out. The poet Gary Snyder predicted the night would be a "poetickall bomshell". He was right, but really, the bombshell was Howl itself. Ginsberg's poem was an incantatory epic – emotionally and sexually explicit and intent on exploding the anxieties of the atomic age. It helped jump-start the counter-cultural revolutions of the next decade and its author was hailed as the voice of the Beat Generation.

He may have been the most important American writer of the last century. He certainly thought he could be. Six months after the Six Gallery reading, he wrote in his journal: "I am the greatest poet in America." Then he added: "Let Jack be greater." "Jack" was Jack Kerouac and the charged relationships between him, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady were famously fictionalised in Kerouac's novel On The Road. There are many people who, as Joyce Johnson says below, "fashioned their adolescent self-image on the characters". There will be even more of them now that Ginsberg is being brought to the screen: the new film Howl tells the story of the poem and subsequent obscenity trial, with James Franco as an uncannily good and enormously sympathetic Ginsberg.

The poet Michael McClure wrote that with Howl, "a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases". He makes it sound dangerous. The accounts of Kerouac passing round jugs of wine and shouting "Go! Go! Go!" throughout the Six Gallery reading certainly make it sound ecstatic. But for some, it sounded criminal. In 1957, an obscenity trial was brought against Howl's publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, based on the poem's homosexual content. A series of critics and editors took to the witness stand to argue Howl's literary worth, and Judge Clayton W Horn eventually ruled that the poem was not obscene: "An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words."

Nonetheless, and to his delight, the trial made Ginsberg a radical figure in the eyes of the public. Less publicised was his extraordinary generosity: friends recall that when he was on his deathbed in 1997 he busied himself with ensuring his money would be sent to those who needed it. A radical sensibility coexisted with a profoundly good and kind soul. His zeal for connecting people lives on – no one who knew him seems able to speak about him without invoking a welter of names and relationships. Here, some of those who were closest to him remember their friend.

Joyce Johnson

A writer and editor who met Ginsberg when she was 16. He introduced her to Jack Kerouac, with whom she had a relationship that he called his greatest love affair. Her memoir of Kerouac, Minor Characters, won a National Book Critics Circle award in 1983.

"I guess the first time I heard Allen read Howl, it must have been in the winter of 57, in some little coffee shop in the East Village. He was riveting, he really was. Every time I saw him, I thought he was riveting and that he established a kind of intimacy with the audience. Howl became an elegy over time, for all those people, but in 56 or 57 it was an indictment of everything that was wrong, an angry, passionate poem and he was like a revolutionary firebrand. One thing I always loved about Allen was his voice. It was very mellow but he could modulate it in all sorts of ways. There was something very attractive and engaging about him.

I'd been hearing a great deal about Jack, so when the opportunity presented itself I definitely wanted to meet him. Allen saw that I was alone, he knew that I was a girl who had an apartment – not easy to find in those days – so he decided that Jack should meet me. One night, while I was visiting, Jack called up on the phone and Allen said: 'Someone wants to speak to you.' So it was really a blind date. Allen handed me the phone and Jack said: 'Hi, I hear you're really nice, if you come down to the Howard Johnsons in Greenwich Village, I'll be waiting at the counter in a red-and-black-checked shirt.' The rest is history.

Allen was actually away in Paris during the fall of 57 when On The Road came out. I think that whole experience for Jack would have been much better if Allen were here [in the US]. Allen always had a very good sense of how to deal with the media and he would have been happy to take some of the limelight. He had a natural instinct for promotion; it was a gift. I remember him running all around town, to various publishers' offices, trying to get his work and everybody else's work published.

He definitely became a public figure, but he was always accessible, he didn't wall himself off at all – he was always out there. He survived extremely terrible circumstances as a child and he was working out his sexual identity at a time when that was so difficult. He easily could have perished, but I guess there was something always very strong in him and he kept going. I just think of his terrific, tremendous intelligence and a real generosity of spirit. Ever since he died and the political situation has unfolded here in various distressing ways, I really have missed Allen's voice. Because he would write a poem about that, you know? There's been no one like that."

John Cassady

Neal and Carolyn Cassady's son is a musician who grew up around Ginsberg and remained friends with him all his life.

"I call him my second father, but he was more like an uncle. I remember in 1964, the Beatles had just hit [the US] – I was 14 and a huge fan. I was living with my parents in the house in California and Jack [Kerouac] and Allen and everybody was in and out. It was kinda an interesting childhood, as you can imagine. I'm sitting across the coffee table from Allen and he goes: 'Johnny! D'you wanna scoop? You want some dirt?' He looks both ways conspiratorially and goes: 'The Beatles smoke pot!' And I say: 'What's pot?' And Allen looked so crestfallen. He gave me this look like, 'aren't you Neal Cassady's son – whaddya mean "what's pot?"' He was so excited to tell me: so here's Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan turning the Beatles on to pot in the hotel room after the Ed Sullivan Show – how many kids get this story?

One time my mother threw this huge party in 1973, I forget the excuse. Allen showed up with this big cast on his right leg, on crutches. I say what happened and he gives me a wink and a nod and says: 'Chasin' women.' Well, he knew better than that but that gave me a big laugh – he was such a funny, clever guy. When the police showed up at the party – we had cars up and down the street for three miles – they saw Allen and asked for his autograph: the cops were fans. I mean, is this a great world or what?

Allen was always very kind and a real gentle soul, never selfish at all. It wasn't until years later that I realised he was a rock star as far as literary history goes."

Steven Taylor

A musician who was Ginsberg's accompanist and collaborator for 20 years.

"I was 20 when we met and everything about him was strange, except the art. I had no experience of gay people, or Russian Jewish people, or the slums of the Lower East Side bohemia; that was all new to me. I'd go to his house and he'd say: 'OK, let's make lunch', and he'd empty the entire contents of the refrigerator on to the table. So lunch would be some boiled eggs from yesterday, some rice, some Chinese cabbage, a little caviar, a little sour cream. He was older than my father but he spoke as I did. My generation assumed that we invented this kind of mix of street jive and college-boy gossip, but we didn't; he was the original hipster.

He wanted intimacy; he was big on vows. Early on, after we became friends, he said: 'Let's make a vow. You tell me all your secrets and I'll tell you all mine." How great is that? To have a friend like that who is so wise and patient and accomplished and generous and that you can actually talk to. We would talk for hours and hours and hours.

I learned a tremendous amount from him. I'd always been a writer but, boy, did I get an education. He'd say: 'It's easier than you think! Just look out your eye like you're looking through a window!' and, 'Nobody wants to hear about your feelings, darling, tell me what you see!'

He lost his mother but he found Kerouac and so what they did together had to become huge because the biggest thing in his life was lost. It couldn't just be them being writers together, it had to be earth-moving, as big as the universe, that's why he pushed everyone around him to publish. He was sort of obsessive about connecting people. The first thing he did when we arrived anywhere was take out his phone book and call everybody to say 'I'm here! What's happening?' I think he liked being famous. There's this American expression "starfucker", someone who really likes to hang out with famous people – he was a real starfucker. And he'd readily acknowledge that with tremendous good humour.

I was kind of elated when he died; I just had this great sense of the generosity of the guy. I feel like I'm with him every day, I hear his voice every day. I feel like he's in me. He had that effect on a lot of people."

Anne Waldman

A fellow poet, Waldman set up Naropa University, a Buddhist-inspired liberal arts college, with Ginsberg and Chögyam Trungpa in 1974. She knew Ginsberg until he died in 1997.

"He was always operating in about 10 directions simultaneously, constantly needing to be up on the latest issues – my God, the cell phone would have been great for him. Wherever he'd go he'd create a culture, he had phenomenal energy. I remember this party in Mayfair and my last image was Allen on the balcony chanting Hare Krishna and Mick Jagger joining in. You always felt his ability to make connections and people were eager to connect with him. He would network, but in the best sense: it was more of a spiritual network.

He was looking at one point for a mother for a child and he called me his spiritual wife, so there were a few times when that came up, but it just seemed too far-fetched. I did feel we were on the same trajectories, we cared about the same things, we'd founded this school which had flourished. So, yes, he's my spiritual husband and Naropa's our baby.

We travelled together on the Rolling Thunder Revue [the 1975/6 US concert tour headed by Bob Dylan] and Allen was such a groupie, he was always in the first row. I remember him wanting to have albums the way Dylan did and Dylan told him to go out on the street and sing – and he did, that's sort of what he was doing all along. He talked about wanting to write a Howl for the 80s, but said he couldn't do it deliberately, that it had to come accidentally almost. But Howl is still a timebomb, it still has this ability to plug you into this whole time and place and situation that then reverberates beyond itself.

When he took psychedelics, the trip would almost be a messianic call to action. I remember him having these dreams about Henry Kissinger in which he tried to tell Kissinger what to do. At the end of his life he was writing to Bill Clinton, wanting to be of service. I think he was fully used in this lifetime. Some people saw him as this egomaniac – there was a lot of jealousy because he took up a lot of attention, a lot of space – but my view was always that he took so many others with him. He was a great, loyal champion of his friends and, beyond that, the family of his friends. When he was dying he was calling round to see who needed support: our final conversation had to do with taking care of people. Don't forget the human and the first-person experience, he said, we have this job to wake up the world to itself."

Howl is released on Friday 25 February.