Ginsberg, Allen

Ginsberg, Allen, (1926–1997), American Beat poet, born in New Jersey, and educated at Columbia University, New York. He took the democratic spirit of Whitman and applied it to his own experiences of homosexuality and madness. His major poems, Howl (1956) and Kaddish (1960), are composed according to the dictates of breath, and are both long laments for an America which has disowned its own more marginalized figures (Trotskyites, Wobblies, Hell's Angels, Junkies, Queers). His empathy for the outcast made him an ideal figurehead for the counter-culture of the 1960s; he wrote and campaigned tirelessly against the Vietnam War, in support of LSD and cannabis, and in defence of such contemporaries as Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, and W. S. Burroughs. His later work, Mind Breaths (1978) and Plutonium Ode and Other Poems (1982), display less of the urgency of his earlier work, yet still maintain a confessional tone wherein his most private concerns are addressed as a statement about the nation. Along with Ann Waldman he founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.