Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg: 1926-1997

• Born in New Jersey to a teacher and a Russian émigré
• Mother struggled with mental illness; he writes about this and her death in Kaddish
• Attended Columbia University
• Meets William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and becomes involved in the growing counter-culture movement and drug use
• 1945: Expelled from Columbia for drawing obscene phrases and sketches in the dust on his dormitory windows to protest a cleaning lady’s negligence
• Does some odd jobs: messman on a merchant ship, welder, night porter, dishwasher
• Lives with Burroughs and Kerouac
• 1948: Has his “Blake Vision”—a vision of Blake reading poems; says that this vision led him to understanding the interconnectedness of the universe
• “Ginsberg was convinced that the presence of ‘this big god overall…and that the whole purpose of being born was the wake up to Him’” (Baym 2731)
• Finishes Columbia in 1948, but spends eight months in a psychiatric hospital as part of a deal to avoid prison time as an accessory in some robbery cases
• Eventually moves to San Francisco
• “Beat” poets:
• Response to WWII restrictive and conservative culture
• Forced on reading public an awareness of other cultures: “drug experiences, lives in prisons and mental hospitals, homosexual and lesbian sexualities, liberal politics, spiritualism not necessarily housed in suburban Protestant environs” (Lauter 2352)
• Often intended to shock readers
• “Beat”—invokes both “beatific” (holy) and “beat-down”
• Belief that a spiritual life is essential to a person’s existence
• 1954: Meets Peter Orlovsky, who becomes his life-long partner
• Carries around a notebook to record the rhythms of voices he hears around him
• “Ginsberg at his best gives a sense of both doom and beauty” (Baym 2731)
• “His disconnected phrases can accumulate as narrative shrieks, or, at other moments, can build as a litany of praise” (Baym 2731)
• 1956: Howl
• William Carlos Williams on Howl: “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell” (Baym 2730)
• Howl combined criticism of the Eisenhower years with exuberant celebration of the emerging counterculture
• By the end of the 1960s, he was widely known and read; was interested in Buddhism, toured college campuses, protested strict drug laws and laws against homosexuality

Works Cited
Baym, Nina, Editor. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
“Beat Movement.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Concise Edition. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 2352.