Allen Ginsberg Biography and List of Works

American poet and diarist, highly visible with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in the beat generation literary movement that burst into prominence in the 1950s. Ginsberg's poem THE HOWL (1956) is considered to be one of the most significant products of that movement. However, before the radical work he underwent a long apprenticeship in traditional rhymed and metered lyrics.

I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical
naked,
dragging themselves through the negro
streets at dawn looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night.
(from The Howl)

Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Louis Ginsberg (1895-1976) was a poet and teacher. During Ginsberg's childhood his mother started to suffer from paranoia. She was institutionalised, lobotomised and died in an asylum in 1956. Her life is the subject of Ginsberg's poem 'Kaddish', which is considered among his greatest achievements. The poem begins with Ginsberg's sense of loss and moves on to document his mother's life and death.

During the Depression era the family lived in Paterson, where Ginsberg discovered the poems of Walt Whitman. He graduated from a public high school and decided to study law. Ginsberg won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he changed his major to English. His studies started well: he became a start student and gained fame in the off-campus underground, making friends with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

In the aftermath of a murder investigation, in which Ginsberg's friend and fellow student Lucien Carr was convicted, Ginsberg was ordered to undergo psychiatric counselling. He was suspended from the university for a year. Before receiving his B.A. from Columbia University in 1949, Ginsberg worked as a welder in the Brooklyn naval yards, as a dishwasher in Times Square, a night porter, and a copy boy.

Ginsberg's troubles with the law continued. His flatmate, the writer Herbert Hunche, used the house as a repository for stolen goods. They were arrested after a car chase. Ginsberg pleaded insanity - he had heard a disembodied voice reciting Blake - and he then spent eight months at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. There was also Carl Solomon, a disciple of Artaud, to whom he later dedicated the Howl. Ginsberg returned to Paterson, where he met the writer William Carlos Williams.

Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, Ginsberg worked for a short time for Newsweek and as a market research consultant in New York and San Francisco (1951-53). In 1955 he gained immediate fame at a poetry reading hosted by Kenneth Rexroth, where he read the Howl. The poem was printed next year with a foreword by Williams: "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." The police seized the entirely printing on the grounds of obscenity: Ginsberg's loudly declared homosexuality was explicitly expressed in the book. The matter went to trial and Ginsberg used his fame in the publication of Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Burrough's The Naked Lunch (1959).

Ginsberg started to travel widely both at home and abroad. He performed his own and Blake's poetry set to music, experimented with hallucinogens and campaigning for the liberation of American anti-drug laws. Trips to the Far East and India with his lover Peter Orlovsky inspired the collection THE CHANGE (1963). In the 1960s Ginsberg was one of the central figures of the counter-culture. He lectured at universities, opposed the Vietnam War and was arrested in the riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Cuba deported him after he protested at the regiment's treatment of homosexuals and the students of Prague elected him 'The King of May' - the Czech authorities soon deported him.

In the 1970s Ginsberg was jailed for his part in an anti-Nixon protest, he toured with Bob Dylan and campaigned on ecological issues. He wrote 'Plutonium Ode' to be read aloud at a public demonstration in Colorado and was arrested again. In the 1980s he opposed Reagan's covert policies in Nicaragua, and worked as a visiting professor at Columbia (1986-87) and taught at Brooklyn College. His 800-page COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1980 was published in 1984.

Ginsberg's turning to Buddhism deeply affected his poetry and worldview. His collections in the 1960s include KADDISH AND OTHER POEMS (1961), REALITY SANDWICHES (1963), PLANET NEWS (1964). In the 1970s appeared FIRST BLUES (1975), POEMS ALL OVER THE PLACE (1978). In 1972 Ginsberg won the National Book Award for THE FALL OF AMERICA. Some of his talks on poetry and politics are included in ALLEN VERBATIM (1974). JOURNALS, EARLY FIFTIES EARLY SIXTIES was published in 1977. SELECTED GAY POEMS ANN CORRESPONDENCE, a collection of poems and letters, exchanged between Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, appeared in 1978.

Howl is a long, free verse poem, reminiscent of Walt Whitman. It exemplifies Ginsberg's poetics of spontaneous composition with attention paid to the natural wanderings of the mind and the rhythms of breathing. It became one of the symbols of the liberation of American culture in the 1950s from an academic formalism and political conservatism. Influenced by the mysticism and poetics of Blake, Howl celebrated and lamented with the nuances from the Old Testament the casualties of Truman's and Eisenhower's America, and in particular the lives of bohemians who were identified by John Clellon Holmes and the Beat Generation. The final part, 'Footnote to Howl' is a hymn of praise: because of human love, the world is holy, despite the nightmare.

For further reading: Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties by E. Mottram (1972); Naked Angels by J. Tytell (1976); Allen Ginsberg by Barry Miles (1989); Dharma Lion by Matthew A. Schumacher (1992); The Response to Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1994 by Bill Morgan (1996); Beat Culture and the New America, by Lisa Phillips et al (1996); Ex-Friends by Norman Podhoretz (1999); Screaming With Joy by Graham Caveney (1999)

THE HOWL AND OTHER POEMS, (1956)