Ginsberg, Allen

Ginsberg, Allen (1926–), New Jersey‐born poet, after graduation from Columbia and work at odd jobs found his voice in San Francisco during the time of the Beat movement with the publication of Howl and Other Poems (1956), which became famous when its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was tried and acquitted for issuing that allegedly obscene work. Its rhapsodic, passionate, Whitmanesque view of modern corruption brought Ginsberg a great reputation, enhanced by Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), whose title work was a moving, lyrical lament for his recently dead mother. He issued other, lesser collections with great rapidity, including Empty Mirror (1960), early poems; Reality Sandwiches (1963); written between 1953 and 1960; Planet News (1968), poems of the '60s; T.V. Baby Poems (1968); and Ankor Wat (1968). He also traveled widely, freely expressing his antiauthoritarian views as well as his new belief in Zen Buddhism, which made him the guru of a new generation, a cult figure for “drop‐outs” of all ages who espoused the romantic, mystic, and pacifistic idea of “flower power,” a phrase Ginsberg coined. A special sort of spokesman of the '60s, Ginsberg received formal honors in the next decade when The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973) was granted a National Book Award. Other later collections include The Gates of Wrath (1973), rhymed poems written 1948–51; Iron Horse (1973); First Blues (1975); Sad Dust Glories (1975); Mind Breaths (1977); Poems All Over the Place, Mostly 'Seventies (1978); Plutonian Ode (1981), poems dating back only to 1977; Collected Poems 1947–1980 (1984); and White Shroud (1986), poems of 1980–85. His prose includes The Yage Letters (1963), correspondence with William Burroughs; Indian Journals (1970); Allen Verbatim (1974), lectures; The Vision of the Great Rememberer (1974), concerning his friendship with Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac; Journals (1977), texts of the 1950s and '60s; As Ever (1977), correspondence with Cassady; Composed on the Tongue (1980), interviews; and Straight Hearts' Delight (1980), letters and love poems exchanged with Peter Orlovsky.