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Allen Ginsberg


Allen Ginsberg "saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness" ("Howl"). He struggled through family conflicts and homosexuality throughout his adolescence, and then he went on to become one of the most read poets of his time. Allen was a strong man who never allowed anything get the best of him, including fear. He made a list of all his fears, large and small, and then worked his way through them, ridding himself of one fear after another (Mitchell 30). His influence on everyone he came in contact with carries on even after his death, and many writers dedicate their time to documenting his life as it affected them. Readers of his poetry say he has "a delicate lyrical style reminiscent of certain seventeenth century poets" (Brinnin 49). Allen Ginsberg, father of the beat generation, was the embodiment of the ideals of personal freedom, nonconformity, and the search for enlightenment.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, and soon after moved to Paterson, New Jersey ("Modern American Poetry"). He was his parent's second child, preceded by one brother, Eugene, who was named after a speaker his father was impressed with as a young child (Miles 30). His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a high school teacher and a moderate Jew Socialist, and Naomi, his mother, was a "radical communist and irrepressible nudist who went tragically insane during early adulthood" ("Literary Kicks"). Naomi grew up speaking Yiddish and learned to play the mandolin when she was young. She went to Barringer high school, which is where she met Louis Ginsberg in 1912, when they were both only seventeen (Miles 12). Often Naomi, who also suffered through recurrent epileptic seizures and a severe form of paranoia, would trust only Allen when she was convinced the rest of the world, and her family, were plotting against her ("Literary Kicks"). Allen would frequently stay home from school in order to look after Naomi on her particularly bad days, and he later wrote the poem "Kaddish" explaining in harrowing detail his strange relationship with his mother (Miles 30).

In the winter of 1941 Naomi's condition had worsened, resulting in wild imaginings such as Louis poisoning her soup, and Allen would taste it to prove to her it was safe (30). Later that winter Naomi made Allen take her to a therapist at Lakewood, New Jersey Rest Home. She was in and out of institutions for a long time following, and her condition continued to worsen until she was hospitalized for life and finally lobotomized ("Literary Kicks"). She died at Pilgrim State Hospital in 1956 ("Modern American Poetry").
Allen changed high schools often, but finally settled in East Side High. His vast knowledge of politics, his collection of appalling jokes, and his poetry, which he read aloud in English class, all helped him to be accepted as a member of the graduating class (Miles 30). He became president of both the debating society and the dramatic society.
It was Allen's English teacher Frances Durbin who introduced him to the poetry of Walt Whitman (30). He has described how one afternoon she "Read aloud verses from Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself' in so enthusiastic and joyous a voice, so confident and lifted with laughter, that I immediately understood 'I wear my hat indoors as well as out?I find fat no sweeter than that which sticks to my own bones' forever, and still remember her black-dressed bulk seated squat behind and English class desk, her embroidered collar, her voice powerful and high, lilting Whitman's very words and shafts of sunlight through school windows that looked down on green grass."

Upon graduating high school in 1943 Allen attended Columbia University on a scholarship intending to pursue the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to establish a career as a labor lawyer. ("Literary Kicks")

During his freshman year he was introduced to a new crowd of wild friends, including students Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and non-students William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Allen, the youngest and most innocent of the group helped them develop their literary smarts, while they, in turn, helped him by utterly shattering his naiveté with drugs, crime, and sex.

In 1948, during his senior year at Columbia, Allen decided to become a poet after hearing in a vision the voice of William Blake reciting the poem "Ah Sunflower" ("Literary Kicks").

Allen eventually was expelled from Columbia for various minor offenses, and began hanging out with time square junkies and thieves, experimenting with Benzedrine and marijuana, and cruising gay bars. He then began a gay affair with the reluctant Neal Cassady, and visited him in Denver and San Francisco ("Literary Kicks").
In 1949 Allen was arrested as an accessory in a crime, and it was arranged by his professors for Allen to get a plea of psychological disability on the condition of being admitted to the Columbian Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute as an alternative to jail time. After spending eight months in the mental institution, he became close friends with the young writer Carl Solomon, who was also being treated there ("Literary Kicks").
Allen and his friends referred to themselves as "The Beat Generation", a phrase coined by Jack Kerouac in the fall of 1948. It refers to "the shared sense of spiritual exhaustion and diffused feelings of rebellion against what they experienced as the general conformity, hypocrisy, and materialism of the larger society around them caught up in the unprecedented prosperity of postwar America"("Modern American Poetry").

The "Beat Movement" in modern literature has become an important period in the history of literature and society in America. "The beats had been, originally a literary event- a scattered pack of writers who had broken through in print and in person what Ginsberg one called 'the syndrome of shut-down'"(Kramer 11). Incorporating influences such as jazz, art, literature, philosophy and religion, the beat writers created a new and prophetic vision of modern life and changed the way generations of people see the world.
In December 1953 Allen left New York City on a trip to Mexico to explore Indian ruins in Yucatan and experiment with various drugs. He finally settled in San Francisco, where he fell in love with a young artist's model, Peter Orlovsky, and delved into the Buddhist religion ("Modern American Poetry").

After spending years trying to turn publishing companies on to the work of his friends, and neglecting his own poetry, Ginsberg gained fame in 1955 when he delivered a public reading of the first part of his new poem Howl to tumultuous applause at Six Gallery reading in San Francisco with some local poets ("Modern American Poetry"). Journalists herald the reading as a landmark and labeled it as the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance ("Modern American Poetry").

Early the following year, with an introduction by William Carlos Williams, Howl and Other Poems was published as number four in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. In May 1956 the San Francisco police, who charged shop managers with publishing and selling an obscene and indecent book, apprehended copies of the small black and white stapled paperback. The American Civil Liberties Union took up the defense of Ginsberg's poem in a highly exposed obscenity trial in San Francisco, which concluded in October 1957 when Judge Clayton Horn ruled that "Howl" had redeeming social value ("Modern American Poetry").

In 1958 Allen returned to New York City, distressed by his mother's death in the mental sanatorium two years earlier, and haunted by the thought that he never had closure. He wrote then what many critics and fans consider to be his greatest poem, "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg" modeling it after the traditional Jewish memorial service for the dead.
Early in the 1960's, Ginsberg was quick to join the hippie movement, and continuing to publish poetry, he became a signature of the hippie subculture in addition to that of the Beatniks. From the beginning, he helped Timothy Leary to publicize the discovery of LSD and was a regular speaker at Vietnam War protests. Additionally, being a famous American poet, he took advantage of the chances to meet important political figures and express to them his radical left-wing views. After the end of the Hippie movement, Ginsberg continued to attend poetry readings and multicultural gatherings around New York City. He both retained an active social life and continued writing poetry until his death on April 5, 1997.

Allen Ginsberg's unique style of poetry has the intense power of making people, both young and old, aware of the truth about the world around them. Where early prose was stiff, the beat revolution allowed for a more supple proceeding writing style. Beat writing has expanded the world of literature, poetry and music to a higher level for people to enjoy. Allen Ginsberg, along with Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady played an important role in the insurrection of modern American poetry, and should be given credit for a revolution so unexpected that the world embraced it, welcomed it, and still cherishes it.


Works Cited


"Allen Ginsberg." Literary Kicks. Feb 2002.
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/people/allenginsberg.html.

Brinnin, John Malcolm and Bill Read ed. Twentieth Century Poet: American and British (1900-1970). St. Louis: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1970.

Charters, Ann. "Allen Ginsberg's Life." Modern American Poets. Feb. 2002.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_1/ginsberg/life.htm.

Ginsberg, Allen. "Howl." March 2000. http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/poems/howl.html.

Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America. New York: Fromm International Pub., 1997.

Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Mitchell, Adrian. "The Man Who Set Me on Fire." New Statesman April 1997: 30(2)

Mitgang, Herbert. Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest
Authors. New York: D.I. Fine, 1988.