Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg, (b. June 3, 1926,
Newark, N.J., U.S.—d. April 5, 1997, New
York, N.Y.), American poet whose epic
poem Howl (1956) is considered to be one
of the most significant products of the
Beat movement.
Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, N.J.,
where his father, Louis Ginsberg,
himself a poet, taught English. Allen
Ginsberg’s mother, whom he mourned in
his long poem Kaddish (1961), was
confined for years in a mental hospital.
Ginsberg was influenced in his work by
the poet William Carlos Williams,
particularly toward the use of natural
speech rhythms and direct observations
of unadorned actuality.
While at Columbia University, where his
anarchical proclivities pained the
authorities, Ginsberg became close
friends with Jack Kerouac and William
Burroughs, who were later to be numbered
among the Beats. After leaving Columbia
in 1948, he traveled widely and worked
at a number of jobs from cafeteria floor
mopper to market researcher.
Howl, Ginsberg’s first published book,
laments what he believed to have been
the destruction by insanity of the “best
minds of [his] generation.” Dithyrambic
and prophetic, owing something to the
romantic bohemianism of Walt Whitman, it
also dwells on homosexuality, drug
addiction, Buddhism, and Ginsberg’s
revulsion from what he saw as the
materialism and insensitivity of
post-World War II America.
Empty Mirror, a collection of earlier
poems, appeared along with Kaddish and
Other Poems in 1961, followed by Reality
Sandwiches in 1963. Kaddish, one of
Ginsberg’s most important works, is a
long confessional poem in which the poet
laments his mother’s insanity and tries
to come to terms with both his
relationship to her and with her death.
In the early 1960s Ginsberg began a life
of ceaseless travel, reading his poetry
at campuses and coffee bars, traveling
abroad, and engaging in left-wing
political activities. He became an
influential guru of the American youth
counterculture in the late 1960s. He
acquired a deeper knowledge of Buddhism,
and increasingly a religious element of
love for all sentient beings entered his
work.
His later volumes of poetry included
Planet News (1968); The Fall of America:
Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (1972),
which won the National Book Award; Mind
Breaths: Poems 1972–1977 (1978); and
White Shroud: Poems 1980–1985 (1986).
His Collected Poems 1947–1980 appeared
in 1984. Collected Poems, 1947–1997
(2006) is the first comprehensive
one-volume collection of Ginsberg’s
published poetry. The Letters of Allen
Ginsberg was published in 2008, and a
collection edited by Bill Morgan and
David Stanford that focuses on
Ginsberg’s correspondence with Kerouac
was published as Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg: The Letters in 2010.
