Allen Ginsberg

The American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary American literature. He was a leading member of the "Beat Movement" and helped lead the revolt against "academic poetry" and the cultural and political establishment of the mid-20th century.

Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, to Russian-Jewish parents. He had an emotionally troubled childhood that was later reflected in his poetry. His mother, Naomi, suffered from various mental illnesses, and was periodically institutionalized during his adolescence. Contributing to Ginsberg's growing confusion during these years was his growing awareness of his homosexuality, which he concealed from both his peers and his parents until he was in his twenties.

Ginsberg enrolled at Columbia University with the intention of becoming a lawyer. At Columbia, he fell in with a crowd that included writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, as well as Lucien Carr and Neal Cassaday. Around the time he was a student at Columbia, Ginsberg got into some trouble with the police. His apartment was used as a base for a robbery, and in order to avoid being charged as an accomplice, he pleaded insanity. He ended up spending several months in a mental hospital.

After graduating with a bachelor of arts from Columbia in 1948, Ginsberg worked as a market researcher in New York and then migrated to San Francisco, where he became a principal figure in the "Beat Generation" literary movement. The Beat movement was an American social and literary movement originated in the 1950s where artists, derisively called "beatniks," expressed their alienation from conventional society by adopting a style of seedy dress, detached manners, and a "hip" vocabulary. Generally indifferent to social problems, they advocated sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism. Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956), along with Kerouac's On the Road ultimately became the "Beat" movement's twin scriptures.

Howl's raw, graphic language dealt with human discontent and despair, moral and social ills, Ginsberg's homosexuality, and his mother's communist beliefs. Many traditional critics were astonished. While some commentators shared the attitude of Walter Sutton, who considered Howl "a tirade revealing an animus directed outward against those who do not share the poet's social and sexual orientation," others echoed the opinion of Paul Zweig, who argued that the poem "almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditional poetry of the 1950s." The publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, became a defendant in an obscenity trial, but was later acquitted after testimony led Judge Clayton W. Horn to rule that Howl was not obscene. Still, leading literary and popular journals typically complained that Howl was vulgar and undisciplined. Another critic complained that "Ginsberg made it seem like anybody could write poetry.

Nevertheless, Ginsberg's triumphant synthesis of sociology and mysticism, Blake and Walt Whitman, and the Bible and Marxism, had found an audience. Declaiming his poems in coffeehouses, jazz clubs, and colleges, Ginsberg (with a thick, untrimmed beard and his balding head heavily fringed with hair) reinforced his dual image: a saint to the underground minority, a freak to the mainstream majority.

Ginsberg's next volume Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960 (1961), delved further into his past. Based on the "Kaddish," a traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead, it poignantly expressed the anger, love, and confusion felt towards his mother while rendering the social and historical milieu which informed his mother's troubled life. Some critics considered this piece to be his most important work. John Tytell explained "Kaddish testified for Ginsberg's capacity for involvement with another human in torment, for the acceptance of another's weirdness."

Ginsberg had visions while reading the poetry of William Blake. These visions led him to experiment with drugs, and he took LSD under the guidance of the late Timothy Leary in the 1960s. He said that some of his best poetry was written under the influence of drugs: the second part of Howl with peyote, Kaddish with amphetamines, and Wales - A Visitation with LSD. However, after a trip to India in 1962, where he was introduced to yoga and meditation, he, generally, changed his mind about drugs. He believed that yoga and meditation were far superior to raising one's consciousness, but still believed that psychedilcs could prove helpful in writing poetry.

Ginsberg was a visible political activist in the 1960s and 1970s. He coined the term and advocated "flower power," a strategy in which antiwar demonstrators promoted positive values like peace and love to dramatize their opposition to the death and destruction caused by the Vietnam War. He protested at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and later testified on behalf of the "Chicago Seven" who were prosecuted on conspiracy charges. Ginsberg was later jailed after demonstrating against President Richard Nixon at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. He was also a staunch advocate for gay rights. When asked to describe his social and political views, he simply responded "Absolute defiance." These experiences, as well as his conversion to Buddhism, his concerns about aging, and the anguish over the deaths of close friends Kerouac and Cassaday, heavily influenced Ginsberg's work.

Ginsberg was a survivor, as he outlived enemies like J. Edgar hoover who thought he was a threat to the establishment. He remained durable, and was an icon of American counterculture for four decades. It could be said that if one generation outgrew him, a new one rose to show their interest. In the 1990s, he was a favorite on MTV, and collaborated with the band Sonic Youth and singer Bono of U2.

In later years, Ginsberg's health began to fail. He suffered from cirrhosis of the liver, bouts of hepatitis, diabetes, and Bell's palsy, which left his face partially paralyzed. As he continued his relentless self-promotion and an exhausting schedule, Ginsberg accomplished what few writers attain: his acclaim and celebrity were at their height at his death. He had always said he wanted to die peacefully, and on April 5, 1997, at the age of 70, just days after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, he died, surrounded by "close friends and lovers" in his New York apartment. Ferlinghetti stated, "He went the way he wanted to go." Longtime friend and former California lawmaker Tom Hayden told CNN, "Allen was like a prophet of the 1960s." His most recent works before his death were Selected Poems, 1947-1955 and a rock cd The Ballad of the Skeletons.

There are also excellent pieces in his other collections: Empty Mirror (1962); Reality Sandwiches (1963); The Yage Letters (1964), written with William Burroughs; The Marihuana Papers (1966); TV Baby Poem (1968); Planet News 1961-1967 (1969); Ankor Wat (1969); and Indian Journals (1970).

Further Reading

Serious attention to Ginsberg's work is lacking, but Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (1969), is a sympathetic, excellent biography. Obituaries which extensively detailed Ginberg's life and his writings appeared in the April 6, 1997 editions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. □

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.

Allen Ginsberg , 1926–97, American poet, b. Paterson, N.J., grad. Columbia, 1949. An outspoken member of the beat generation , Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem attacking American values in the 1950s. The prose of Jack Kerouac , the insights of Zen Buddhism , and the free verse of Walt Whitman were some of the sources for Ginsberg's quest to glorify everyday experience, embrace the ecstatic moment, and promote sponteneity and freedom of expression. His volumes of poetry include Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958–60 (1961), Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (1984), and White Shroud: Poems 1980–85 (1986). His Collected Poems: 1947–1997 was published in 2006. Allen Verbatim (1974) is a collection of lectures, and Deliberate Prose (2000) a selection of essays.

Bibliography: See his journals (5 vol., 1971–96); collected correspondence (5 vol., 1976–2001), M. Schumacher, ed., Family Business: Selected Letters between a Father and Son (2001), B. Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (2008) and The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder (2008); B. Morgan and D. Stanford, ed., Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (2010); D. Carter, ed., Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996 (2001); S. Greenough, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (2010, museum catalog); biographies by B. Miles (1989), M. Schumacher (1992), and B. Morgan (2006); studies by L. Hyde, ed. (1984), T. F. Merrill (1988), B. Miles (1993), and B. Morgan (2010); bibliographies ed. by G. Dowden (1971), M. P. Kraus (1980), and B. Morgan (1995).

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.

Ginsberg, Allen (1926–97) US poet. Zen Buddhism, meditation, and the use of drugs all influenced Ginsberg's work. His first collection of verse, Howl and Other Poems (1956), a condemnation of American society, established him as the leading poet of the beat movement. Other works include Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), a lament for his mother.