Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg was an acclaimed poet and a leading figure of the Beat Generation whose radical literary works and advocacy for social change left an indelible mark on American counterculture. Ginsberg first came to public attention in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Books).

“Howl,” also known as “Howl for Carl Solomon,” is a long-lined poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman and an outcry of rage and despair against a destructive, abusive society. The poem’s raw, honest language and its “Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath,” as Ginsberg called it, stunned many traditional critics. James L. Dickey, for instance, referred to “Howl” as “a whipped-up state of excitement” and concluded that “it takes more than this to make poetry.” 

Other critics responded to “Howl” more positively. Richard Eberhart, for example, called “Howl” “a powerful work, cutting through to dynamic meaning…It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit…Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love.” Appraising the impact of “Howl,” Paul Zweig noted that it “almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditionalist poetry of the 1950s.”

On March 25, 1957, customs officials seized 520 copies of Howl that were being imported from England by claiming that the book was obscene. In June, Shig Murao, the City Lights bookstore manager, was arrested and jailed for selling Howl to an undercover San Francisco police officer. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was subsequently arrested for publishing the book.The ensuing trial attracted national attention, as prominent literary figures such as Mark Schorer, Kenneth Rexroth, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark spoke in defense of Howl. Schorer testified that “Ginsberg uses the rhythms of ordinary speech and also the diction of ordinary speech. I would say the poem uses necessarily the language of vulgarity.” Clark called Howl “the work of a thoroughly honest poet, who is also a highly competent technician.” The testimony eventually persuaded Judge Clayton W. Horn to rule that Howl was not obscene. The qualities cited in its defense helped make Howl the manifesto of the Beat Movement and pave the way for other challenging works to be published. 

Ginsberg went on to publish many books after Howl, including Kaddish and Other Poems (City Lights, 1961), Planet News: 1961–1967 (City Lights, 1968), and The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (City Lights, 1973), which won the National Book Award.

Often, Ginsberg’s poems contain references to his early childhood and young adulthood. Born in Newark, New Jersey, to a Jewish family, he grew up in nearby Paterson. Both of his parents, Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, were members of the New York literary counterculture of the 1920s. Louis was a schoolteacher and a published poet. Naomi was a supporter of the communist party and would bring her sons along with her to party meetings. She had a mental illness and was in and out of mental hospitals throughout Ginsberg’s childhood and adulthood. In Allen Ginsberg: A Biography (Virgin Books, 2000), Barry Miles observed, “Naomi’s illness gave Allen an enormous empathy and tolerance for madness, neurosis, and psychosis.” “Kaddish,” a poem similar in style and form to “Howl,” is based on the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead and tells the life story of Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi. The poet’s complex feelings for his mother, colored by her struggle with mental illness, are at the heart of this long-lined poem. It is considered to be one of Ginsberg’s finest: Thomas F. Merrill called it “Ginsberg at his purest and perhaps at his best”; Louis Simpson referred to it as “a masterpiece.” Ginsberg’s experiences with his mother’s mental illness and institutionalization are also frequently referred to in “Howl.”

In 1943, while studying at Columbia University, Ginsberg befriended William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. The trio later established themselves as pivotal figures in the Beat Movement. Known for their unconventional views and frequently rambunctious behavior, Ginsberg and his friends also experimented with drugs. On one occasion, Ginsberg used his college dorm room to store stolen goods acquired by an acquaintance. When faced with prosecution, Ginsberg took a plea deal and subsequently spent several months in a mental institution. It was in a waiting room of the New York State Psychiatric Institute that Ginsberg first met the writer Carl Solomon, to whom Ginsberg would later dedicate his poem “Howl.”

After graduating from Columbia, Ginsberg remained in New York City and worked various jobs, took part in public readings at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, and met Gregory Corso, who became a lifelong friend. In 1954, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco, where the Beat Movement was developing through the activities of such poets as Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. That same year, he met the poet Peter Orlovsky. They fell in love and were lifelong partners. Selections from their correspondence have been published in several books, including The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (Da Capo Press, 2008), Straight Hearts’ Delight (Gay Sunshine Press, 1980), and the anthology My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries (Leyland Publications, 1998). 

Ginsberg’s early poems were greatly influenced by fellow New Jersey residents Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg recalled being taught at school that Williams “was some kind of awkward crude provincial from New Jersey,” but upon talking to Williams about his poetry, Ginsberg 

suddenly realized [that Williams] was hearing with raw ears. The sound, pure sound and rhythm—as it was spoken around him, and he was trying to adapt his poetry rhythms out of the actual talk-rhythms he heard rather than metronome or sing-song archaic literary rhythms.

Another major influence was Ginsberg’s friend Kerouac, who wrote novels in a “spontaneous prose” style that Ginsberg admired and adapted in his own work. Ginsberg began writing a poem not, as he states, “by working on it in little pieces and fragments from different times, but remembering an idea in my head and writing it down on the spot and completing it there.” Both Williams and Kerouac emphasized a writer’s emotions and natural mode of expression over traditional literary structures.

A major theme in Ginsberg’s life and poetry was politics. Kenneth Rexroth called this aspect of Ginsberg’s work “an almost perfect fulfillment of the long, Whitman, Populist, social revolutionary tradition in American poetry.” In a number of poems, Ginsberg refers to the union struggles of the 1930s, popular radical figures, and the McCarthy red hunts. In “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” he attempts to end the Vietnam War through a kind of magical, poetic evocation. In “Plutonian Ode,” he attempts a similar feat: ending the dangers of nuclear power through the magic of a poet’s breath.

Ginsberg’s political activities echoed his poetic preference for individual expression over traditional structure. In the mid-1960s, he was closely associated with the counterculture and antiwar movements. He created and advocated “flower power,” a strategy in which antiwar demonstrators promoted positive values like peace and love to dramatize their opposition to the death and destruction caused by the Vietnam War. The use of flowers, bells, smiles, and mantras (sacred chants) became common among demonstrators. 

In 1967, Ginsberg was an organizer of the “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,” an event modeled after the Hindu mela, a religious festival. It was the first of the countercultural festivals and served as an inspiration for hundreds of others. In 1969, when antiwar activists staged an “exorcism of the Pentagon,” Ginsberg composed the mantra they chanted. He testified for the defense in the Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial, in which antiwar activists were charged with conspiracy to cross state lines to promote a riot. Ginsberg was arrested at an antidraft, antiwar demonstration in New York City in 1967 and tear-gassed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. In 1972, he was jailed for demonstrating against then-President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention in Miami. In 1978, he and Peter Orlovsky were arrested for sitting on train tracks in order to stop a trainload of radioactive waste coming from the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Colorado.

Ginsberg’s activism caused him problems in other countries as well. In 1965, he visited Cuba as a correspondent for Evergreen Review. After he complained about the treatment of gay people at the University of Havana, the government asked Ginsberg to leave the country. In the same year, Ginsberg traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he was elected “King of May” by thousands of students in Prague. The next day the Czech government requested that he leave. Ginsberg attributes his expulsion to the Czech secret police being embarrassed by the acclaim given to “a bearded American fairy dope poet.”

Another continuing concern reflected in Ginsberg’s poetry was a focus on the spiritual and visionary. His interest in these matters was inspired by a series of visions he had while reading William Blake’s poetry. Ginsberg recalled hearing “a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.” He added that “the peculiar quality of the voice was something unforgettable because it was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” Such visions prompted an interest in mysticism that led Ginsberg to experiment, for a time, with various drugs. He claimed that some of his best poetry was written under the influence of drugs: the second part of “Howl” with peyote, “Kaddish” with amphetamines, and “Wales—A Visitation” with LSD. 

After a journey to India in 1962, however, during which he was introduced to meditation and yoga, Ginsberg changed his attitude toward drugs. He became convinced that meditation and yoga were far superior in raising one’s consciousness, while he maintained that psychedelics could prove helpful in writing poetry. Psychedelics, he said, are “a variant of yoga and [the] exploration of consciousness.”

Ginsberg’s study of Eastern religions was spurred on by his discovery of mantras, which are rhythmic chants used for spiritual effects. Their use of rhythm, breath, and elemental sounds seemed to him a kind of poetry. He incorporated mantras into the body of poems, which transformed the work into a kind of poetic prayer. During poetry readings, he often began by chanting a mantra in order to set the proper mood. His interest in Eastern religions eventually led him to the Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Buddhist abbot from Tibet who strongly influenced Ginsberg’s writing. The early 1970s found the poet taking classes at Trungpa’s Naropa Institute in Colorado as well as teaching poetry classes there. In 1972, Ginsberg took the Refuge and Boddhisattva vows, formally committing himself to the Buddhist faith.

In 1974, Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, with John Cage and Diane di Prima, co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics as a branch of Trungpa’s Naropa Institute. Ginsberg attracted such prominent writers as Ron Padgett and William S. Burroughs to speak and teach at the school.

As a result of his rise to influence and his staying power as a figure in American art and culture, Ginsberg’s work was the object of much scholarly attention throughout his lifetime. A documentary directed by Jerry Aronson, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, was released in 1994. The same year, Stanford University paid Ginsberg a reported one million dollars for his personal archives. Ginsberg, however, remained a controversial figure throughout his life. An alumni group pressured Stanford University to withdraw their offer by citing Ginsberg’s involvement with NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association), though Ginsberg said he joined the organization in order to defend free speech. Ginsberg’s involvement with NAMBLA also cost him a teaching position at his alma mater, Columbia University.

In the spring of 1997, while already plagued with diabetes and chronic hepatitis, Ginsberg was diagnosed with liver cancer. After learning of this illness, Ginsberg promptly produced twelve brief poems. The next day he suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. Two days later, he died. In the New York Times, Ginsberg was remembered by William Burroughs as “a great person with worldwide influence.”

Ginsberg’s poetry from the last few years of his life was collected in Death & Fame: Poems, 1993–1997 (Harper Perennial, 2000). This volume includes works produced by Ginsberg immediately after he learned of his cancer. A Publishers Weekly reviewer, who acknowledged that “there has never been an American poet as public as Ginsberg,” described Death and Fame as “a perfect capstone to a noble life.” 

Another of Ginsberg’s posthumous publications, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995 (Harper Collins, 2000), presents more than 150 essays on such subjects as nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, censorship, poets including Walt Whitman and Gregory Corso, and other cultural luminaries, including musician John Lennon and photographer Robert Frank. A Publishers Weekly critic appraised Deliberate Prose as “sometimes lovely, sometimes slapdash” and added that the book is “sure to appeal to [Ginsberg’s] broad contingent of fans.” Booklist reviewer Ray Olson, meanwhile, found Ginsberg’s essays “more immediately approachable than much of his verse.”

Ginsberg’s letters, journals, and even his photographs of fellow Beats continue to provide critics and scholars with new insights into his life and work. “Like it or not, no voice better echoes his times than Mr. Ginsberg’s,” concluded a reviewer in The Economist. “He was a bridge between the literary avant-garde and pop culture.”