ALLEN GINSBERG (1947-74)

Poet whose Howl (1956) was the most important poem produced by the Beat generation, an antiformalist group of writters and bohemians of the 1950s; the term Beat suggests both their weariness and the spiritual state of beatitude they felt this exhaustion nourished. The term also suggests the beat of jazz to which the Beat poets often declaimed their own verse in counterpoint.

After the movement never more than a loose conglomeration of rebels, burned out, Ginsberg went on to become in the mid-1960s a father figure for a younger generation of artists and rebels.

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 (1960) was confined for years in a mental hospital. Ginsberg was influenced by the noted poet from Paterson, 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 such writers as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs who were the movement surfaced in San Francisco six years later. From Kerouac he learned to write without revision giving his lines some of the improvisational honesty of jazz but threatening laxity and discursiveness when intensity of emotion was not sufficiently present to maintain their tautness -a lack he sometimes tried to overcome with the use of drugs.

After leaving Columbia in 1948 he travelled widely and worked at a number of jobs at various notches on the status scale, from cafeteria, floor mopper to market researcher.

Howl, his first published book laments what Ginsberg 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 adiction, Buddhism and Ginsberg´s revulsion from what he saw as the materialism and insensitivity of post-World War II America. The publisher of the book was charged with violating the California obscenity code but was acquited.

Empty Mirror, earlier poems, appeared along with Kaddish in 1961 followed by Reality Sandwiches in 1963. Ginsberg began a life of ceaseless travel, reading his poetry at campuses and coffee bars and meeting poets in South America, South Africa, Europe and India. His Asia ventures deepened his knowledge of Buddishm and increasingly a religious element of love for all sentient beings -even for those opposing his beliefs- entered his work.

Ginsberg was one of those who brought Eastern thought to the younger generation of rebels. Posters of him garbed as Uncle Sam reflected both their homage to him and their anger at contemporary U.S. society.

In 1968 Planet News which included poems written from 1961 to 1967 appeared as well as Airplane Dreams with composition from the journals he had kept over the years. Ankor Wat (1968), a long visionary poem was according to the author written in one night with his mind drowsed by drugs, one of several such efforts to modify his consciousness for the purposes of his poetry.