Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), American poet, regarded as the spokesman for the Beat Generation of the 1950s. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Ginsberg was educated at Columbia University. During his time in New York City he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, who would later become integral members of the Beat movement. After graduating from Columbia in 1948, Ginsberg worked at various jobs before moving to San Francisco in the early 1950s. There he met American poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights, published Ginsberg’s first book, Howl (1956). Howl was initially seized by the government under obscenity charges, but the charges eventually were dropped, and the book is now recognized as the first important poem of the Beat movement. An angry indictment of America’s false hopes and broken promises, Howl uses vivid images and long, overflowing lines to illuminate Ginsberg’s thoughts. Howl and Ginsberg’s subsequent poetry show the influence of English poet William Blake (who Ginsberg claimed once spoke to him in a vision) and American poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg’s poetry is informal, discursive, and often repetitive. Its immediacy, honesty, and explicit sexual subject matter frequently give it an improvised quality.

Beginning in the late 1950s Ginsberg began to travel throughout the world, commonly giving public readings of his poetry. In the United States young people looked to Ginsberg as a guide through the turbulent 1960s, and although some of his early poems were written under the influence of drugs, in the early 1960s Ginsberg renounced drug use as a form of inspiration. His participation in political protests was reflected in his poetry. He often took up social causes such as gay rights and, later, environmental issues. Religious philosophy also influenced Ginsberg, and he drew on Jewish and Buddhist ideas in his work and in his lifestyle. Other volumes of Ginsberg’s poetry include Kaddish (1961), a long poem mourning his mother; Reality Sandwiches (1963); Planet News; (1968); Collected Poems 1947-1980 (1984); White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985 (1987); and Selected Poems 1947-1995 (1996). In 1995 a collection of Ginsberg’s early writings was published as Journals Mid-Fifties (1954-1958). The volume deals with such themes as his acceptance of his homosexuality, his literary friendships, his extensive travels, and his rejection of American materialism.