Ann Charters Ginsberg, Allen (June 3, 1926 – April 6, 1997), poet, was born in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest son of Louis Ginsberg, a high school English teacher. and poet, and Naomi Levy Ginsberg. Ginsberg grew up with his older brother Eugene in a home darkened by his mother's mental illness; she suffered from recurrent epileptic seizures and paranoia. An active member of the American Communist Party, Naomi Ginsberg took her sons to radical left meetings dedicated to the cause of international communism during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayIn the winter of 1941, while Allen was in high school, his mother insisted that he take her at a therapist's Lakewood, New Jersey, nursing home, a disruptive bus trip he described in his long autobiographical poem "Kaddish." Naomi Ginsberg spent most of the next fifteen years in mental hospitals, suffering the effects of electroshock treatments and a lobotomy before her death at Pilgrim State Hospital in 1956. Witnessing Ginsberg's mental illness his mother had a traumatic effect on Ginsberg, who wrote poetry about her unstable condition for the rest of his life. A 1943 graduate of Newark's East Side High School, Ginsberg later recalled that his most memorable school day was the afternoon his English teacher Frances Durbin read "Song of Myself" aloud. by Walt Whitman with a voice "so enthusiastic and joyful... so confident and filled with laughter" that he never forgot the image of "his mass dressed in black, seated behind an English classroom desk, his embroidered collar, his powerful and high voice" (quoted in Schumacher, p. 17). Despite his passionate response to Whitman's poetry, Ginsberg cited government or legal work as his choice of future profession in the high school yearbook. Attending Columbia University on scholarship, Ginsberg considered his favorite course to be the required freshman great books seminar taught by Lionel. Trill. Later, Ginsberg also cited noted literary critics and biographers Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver as influential professors at Columbia. But Ginsberg's friends at Columbia had an even greater influence than his teachers on his decision to become a poet. As a freshman, he met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, part of a diverse (and now legendary) circle of friends that expanded to include the Times Square heroin addict , Herbert Huncke, the young novelist John Clellon. Holmes, and a handsome young drifter and car thief from Denver named Neal Cassady, with whom Ginsberg fell in love. Kerouac described the intense meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady in the first chapter of his novel On the Road (1957). These friends became the core of a group that called themselves the “Beat Generation” writers. The term was coined by Kerouac in the fall of 1948 during a conversation with Holmes in New York. The word "beat" loosely referred to their shared sense of spiritual exhaustion and their diffuse feelings of rebellion against what they felt was the general conformity, hypocrisy and materialism of the wider society around them, taken in the unprecedented prosperity of postwar America. In the summer of 1948, during his senior year at Columbia, Ginsberg had dedicated himself to becoming a poet after hearing in a vision the voice of William Blake reciting the poem "Ah Sunflower." Experimenting with drugs like marijuana and nitrous oxide to induce other visions, or what Ginsberg later described as "an exalted state of mind", hefelt that the duty of the poet was to bring to his readers a visionary awareness of reality. He was not satisfied with the poetry he wrote at this time, traditional work modeled on English poets like Sir Thomas Wyatt or Andrew Marvell whom he had studied at Columbia. In June 1949, Ginsberg was arrested as an accessory to the crimes committed by Huncke and his friends, who had stored stolen goods in Ginsberg's apartment. As an alternative to a prison sentence, Ginsberg's professors, Van Doren and Trilling, arranged with the dean of Columbia to argue for psychological disability, on the condition that Ginsberg be admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute . Spending eight months in a psychiatric institution, Ginsberg befriended the young writer Carl Solomon, who was treated there for depression with insulin shock. In December 1953, Ginsberg left New York for a trip to Mexico to explore the Yucatan Indian ruins and experiment. with various medications. He moved to San Francisco, where he fell in love with a young artist's model, Peter Orlovsky; he took a job in market research, thinking he could enroll in the graduate English program at the University of California, Berkeley. In August 1955, inspired by the manuscript of a long jazz poem titled "Mexico City Blues" that Kerouac had recently written in Mexico City, Ginsberg found the courage to begin typing out what he called his most personal "imaginative sympathies." in the long poem. "Howl for Carl Solomon" (original draft Howl facsimile, p. xii). As his biographer Bill Morgan stated, in the poem "Allen finally accepted his homosexuality and stopped trying to become 'straight'" (Allen Ginsberg and Friends, p. 31). In October 1955, Ginsberg read the first part of his new poem in public. for the first time to tumultuous applause during a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco with local poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Philip LaMantia. Journalists were quick to herald this reading as a landmark event in American poetry, the birth of what they called the San Francisco Poetic Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran the City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Publishing House in North Beach, sent Ginsberg a telegram echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "I salute you at the beginning of a great career. In 1968 Ginsberg received extensive television coverage during the Democratic National Convention when he and members of the National Mobilization Committee who were against American participation in the Vietnam War clashed with police in Grant Park in Chicago. The poet stood on an impromptu stage and chanted "Om" to try to calm the crowds brutally attacked by tear gas and batons. Ginsberg's courage, humanitarian political views and support of homosexuality, commitment to Eastern meditation practices, and charismatic personality made him one of the favorite spokespeople chosen by a younger generation of radicalized Americans known as “hippies” at the end of this turbulent decade. By the early 1970s, Ginsberg's serious, bearded image with black-rimmed glasses, tweed jacket, and paper "Uncle Sam" top hat became ubiquitous. poster protesting against the Vietnam War. In 1971, Ginsberg met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who became his meditation teacher at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado. Three years later, Ginsberg, assisted by the young poet Anne Waldman, founded a creative writing program called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics atNaropa. Ginsberg taught summer poetry workshops there and lectured during the academic year at Brooklyn College as a tenured distinguished professor until the end of his life. In his later years, publishing regularly and traveling tirelessly despite increasing health problems related to diabetes and the aftereffects of a stroke, Ginsberg gave readings in Russia, China, Europe, and the South Pacific. . In the bardic tradition of William Blake, who played the pump organ when he read his poems, Ginsberg often accompanied himself on a portable harmonium purchased in Benares for fifty dollars. He was the archetypal writer of the Beat Generation to countless poetry and general audiences. Unlike Kerouac, who died in 1969, Ginsberg remained a radical poet, the embodiment of the ideals of personal freedom, non-conformism and the search for enlightenment. As a member of the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters, he unabashedly used his prestige to champion the work of his friends. Two months before his seventy-first birthday, he died of liver cancer at his home in the East Village, New York. The dust cover of the latter book is a color photograph of the poet standing in his apartment next to a portrait. by Walt Whitman, both with white beards. The list of Ginsberg's forty most important titles in his posthumous work Death and Fame was assembled by his editors Bob Rosenthal, Peter Hale and Bill Morgan in the categories of poetry, prose, photography and vocal lyrics and music. Bill Morgan compiled Ginsberg's 456-page descriptive bibliography, The Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941-1994 (1995). J. W. Ehrlich edited Howl of the Censor (1961), an account of the 1957 San Francisco trial investigating obscenity in Ginsberg's poem. Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America, was an early biography, followed by two full-length biographies: Barry Miles, Ginsberg (1989) and Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (1992). Bill Morgan, archivist for the estate of Allen Ginsberg, prepared the biographical text in Allen Ginsberg and Friends (New York: Sotheby's Catalog for Sale 7351, October 7, 1999). Thomas Gladysz Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926 and raised in Paterson, New Jersey. His father, Louis, was a high school teacher and accomplished lyric poet. Her mother, Naomi, a communist during the Great Depression, suffered from psychotic delusions. Sometimes she insisted there were wires in her head that people could hear her think with. Growing up in a family of modest means, Ginsberg's youth seemed to distance him from the conventional. He came from a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, his family had ties to the radical labor movement, his mother was crazy, and he was gay: four prescriptions in the conventional 1940s and 1950s for a sense of profound alienation. Inspired by Naomi's "crazy idealism" to advocate for the disadvantaged, Ginsberg entered Columbia University as a pre-law student. He later changed his major to literature and studied under Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling However, the off-campus circle of friends with whom he became involved was more influential in Ginsberg's artistic and personal development. At the center were Jack Kerouac, a former Columbia student, and William S. Burroughs, a former Columbia student. cosmopolitan and sophisticated hipster who introduced his younger colleagues to the various subcultures of Manhattan. Ginsberg's other friends and acquaintances at the time included writers Herbert Hunke, John Clellon Holmes, and Lucien Carr (the author's father at the time). success Caleb Carr) as well as the charasmatic Neal Cassady Everyone.would become a key figure in the Beat movement a decade later. In 1945, for reasons now obscure in legend, Ginsberg was expelled from Colombia. Reinstated in 1946, he obtained his baccalaureate two years later. However, 1948 was significant for a central experience in Ginsberg's life as a poet. Living in an apartment building in East Harlem, Ginsberg heard the voice of William Blake intone “Ah! Sunflower.” Looking out the window. . . I began to notice in every corner where I looked the traces of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. One hand had placed them there - that one hand had placed the entire universe before me. . . . Or that God was before my eyes – existence itself was God. . . . what I saw was a visionary thing, it was a lightness in my body. . . my body suddenly felt light and a sense of cosmic awareness, vibration, understanding, awe, wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening to a totally deeper real universe in which I existed. (ParisReview interview)The search for a “totally deeper real universe” continued for Ginsberg. He remained in New York until 1953, writing poetry (much of it conventional) and supporting himself by working as a book reviewer, market researcher, etc. . . . Deciding to follow Neal Cassady (with whom he had fallen in love) to San Francisco, Ginsberg traveled to Cuba, Mexico, and eventually arrived on the West Coast, home to a vibrant, bohemian literary community. (For more on the early Beat, see “How Beat Happened,” a superb introduction to Beat Culture by Steve Silberman.) Carrying a letter of introduction from poet (and Paterson resident) William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg met Kenneth Rexroth. , distinguished man of letters and center of what was then known as the San Francisco Poetic Renaissance. Chaired by Rexroth, this active Bay Area poetry community included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gary Synder, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Josephine Miles, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, and other writers, artists, filmmakers and before -guards. In October 1955, Rexroth organized a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco: among the poets who read that evening were Synder, Whalen, McClure, Lamantia, and Ginsberg in what would be his poetry reading debut. Encouraged by Kerouac, Ginsberg gave an inspired first reading of “Howl.” I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving and hysterical, naked, dragging themselves at dawn through the Negro streets looking for a dose of anger, hipsters with angel heads, burning for the ancient celestial connection with the starry dynamo in the machinery of night which is poor. and shreds and hollow eyes and . . . So begins “Howl,” one of the most widely read poems of the century. Ginsberg composed it in what he calls his "Hebrew-Melvillian bardic breath", a form of free verse whose sources include the poets and writers Christopher Smart, Percy Shelley, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Antonin Artaud , Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams. In the 1950s (and into the 1960s), Ginsberg also used drugs as a means of inducing visionary consciousness, as his experience with Blake had provided. Thus, exposed to new influences and literary friends in California, Ginsberg achieved the open-form poetry that distinguished his work from the largely traditional verse of the time. After reading Gallery Six, Lawrence Ferlinghetti proposed publishing Howl and Other Poems (1956). ) as part of his City Lights Books Pocket Poet series. In1957, US customs officials and San Francisco police seized the edition and Ferlinghetti was accused of publishing an obscene book. The trial, in which well-known establishment writers like Rexroth, Mark Shorer, Walter Van Tilburg Clark and others testified for the defense, attracted local and national newspaper attention. By the time Judge Clayton W. Horn rendered the verdict that "Howl" was not obscene, the Beat movement had received a manifesto of sorts and Allen Ginsberg was famous. On his way to the next decade - sometimes with Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso and his longtime companion, Peter Orlovsky - Ginsberg traveled the country and the world. Beginning in the early 1950s, Ginsberg ventured to the Yucatan (where he helped discover a remarkable Mayan archaeological site), Tangier (where he visited the expatriate community around Paul Bowles), and Europe (where he will live for some time in Paris). Sea voyages as a member of the merchant navy took him to Africa and the Arctic. In 1960, he spent six months in Chile, Peru, Bolivia and the Amazon region. More importantly, during this period, Ginsberg exorcised some of his inner demons by writing "Kaddish," a long, brilliant poem about his mother's madness and death. Published in book form in 1961, “Kaddish” is a prayer and lament for Naomi Ginsberg. It is also widely considered his finest work. The poem gives a seemingly factual account of her mother's tragic journey through life, from that of a frightened Russian child to a young woman in America and beyond "to education, marriage, nervous breakdown , the operation, teaching at school and learning about madness". “A bittersweet epilogue to “Kaddish,” titled “White Shroud,” was published twenty-five years later. Throughout 1962 and 1963, Ginsberg and Orlovsky toured the Far East. There, Ginsberg came into direct contact with the traditions of Zen Buddhism. His interest in Buddhism and Asian literature was sparked by his friendships in the Bay Area with Synder, Whalen and Rexroth. Ginsberg's interest, which would shape the development of his poetry, continues to the present day. In 1965, Ginsberg traveled to Cuba as a correspondent for the Evergreen Review, but was expelled after speaking out against the government's persecution of homosexuals at the University of Havana. He then traveled to the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia, where he was expelled again after more than 100,000 people in Prague crowned him King of May in 1965. Back in the United States, the FBI placed him on the dangerous persons list. Throughout the 1960s, Ginsberg played an active role in the growing anti-war and counterculture movements. In 1965, he coined the term “flower power”. He was also a moving spirit (along with Synder, McClure and Timothy Leary) behind the first of the hippie mass gatherings, the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Being in 1967, held in nearby Golden Gate Park. arrested along with Dr. Benjamin Spock and others for his role in an anti-war protest in New York. At the 1968 Democratic Convention, Ginsberg was tear-gassed while trying to calm down and chant "Om" at the Yippie Life Festival. At the trial of the protest leaders, known as the Chicago Seven, Ginsberg testified for the defense. Ginsberg's literary efforts during the 1960s and early 1970s were numerous and varied. At the time, poetry was primarily the written art of an academic craftsman. Ginsberg took him out of the office and classroom and onto the podium, becoming a skilled public performer of his poems. His."