ALLEN GINSBERG
(1926-1997)
Renowned Poet - World Traveler
Renowned poet, world traveler, spiritual seeker, founding member of a major literary movement, champion of human and civil rights, photographer and songwriter, political gadfly, teacher and co-founder of a poetics school. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) defied simple classification.
Poets are commonly known only within their circles of readerships but like Walt Whitman, Ginsberg’s name was recognizable to millions who had never read so much as a single word of his poetry. Like Whitman, the foundation of Ginsberg’s work was the notion that one’s individual thoughts and experiences resonated among the masses. “It occurs to me that I am America”, Ginsberg wrote, and while the statement was intended to be humorous, it also illustrated his idea that democracy begins with the raising of a single voice. At the height of his celebrity, Allen Ginsberg was, arguably, as symbolic of America — or at lease a large segment of the country — as anyone.
As a poet, he will probably be remembered most for two lengthy masterworks: “Howl”, with its famous opening line (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”) and relentless, rhythmic litany of lines devoted to the celebration of those minds, and “Kaddish” the powerful, heartbreaking biography of his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, who spent most of her adult life in a state of mental torment.
Other poems illustrate Ginsberg’s expansive interests and styles: “Sunflower Sutra” (Ginsberg’s ode to the beauty of the individual); “America” (a savagely comic commentary on American values); “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (a political diatribe in which Ginsberg individually declares an end to the Vietnam War); “Wales Visitation” (a celebration of nature’s minute particulars); the interconnected poems of The Fall of America, which won Ginsberg the National Book Award; “Father Death Blues” (a moving tribute to his father, poet Louis Ginsberg); and “White Shroud” (a dream poem in which the poet finally resolves some of his ambivalent feelings about his mother). And these are only a few of the many highlights. The overall body of Ginsberg’s work remains one of the most impressive literary canons in American history...(Continue Reading) [4]