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Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=8

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Allen Ginsberg including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/ginsberg.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Allen Ginsberg.

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1281/

This link connects you to "Thru the Vortex: Allen Ginsberg and his Poetry," a web site that contains Ginsberg's poetry, background information on the Beats, picture galleries, and other resources.

BIOGRAPHY

Like Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg was a New Jersey poet. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Ginsberg was introduced to literature early on by his father Louis, himself a poet and high school English teacher. The other major influence in Ginsberg's formative years was his mother, Naomi, who not only was a Communist Party member but also suffered from bouts of acute paranoia and mental illness which Ginsberg records in his long poem Kaddish. Growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, Ginsberg took the modernist American poet William Carlos Williams as a poetic mentor and his letters to Williams appear in the latter's long poem Paterson. Ginsberg went on to study at Columbia University with such famous critics of the time as Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver. But it was also at Columbia and in New York City generally where Ginsberg met through Lucien Carr, those who would become the inner core of the Beat movement: William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady who all appear in Kerouac's celebrated novel On the Road (1957). The paradoxical connotations of the "beat" generation signified both what was down and out and spiritually beatified. That contradictory mix of urban destitution and visionary experience was memorably captured in Ginsberg's groundbreaking volume of verse Howl and Other Poems (1956). Part of this book records not only Ginsberg's subterranean lifestyle but also his hospitalization in the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute where he met the young writer Carl Solomon. Ginsberg became a cultural icon and his memorable poetry readings such as his celebrated 1955 reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco with fellow San Francisco Renaissance poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia amounted to performance art. Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Pocket Poets series, Howl and Other Poems was quickly confiscated by the San Francisco police. By the end of 1957, however, the American Civil Liberties Union successfully defended the book, convincing Judge Clayton Horn that the work had aesthetic and social value that exceeded the charges of pornography. Reviving the long line and poetic catalogue forms of Walt Whitman, whom the poet addresses in "Supermarket in California," Ginsberg went on to publish an elegy for his mother Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), followed by such major volumes as Reality Sandwiches (1963), Planet News, 1061-1967 (1968), The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971 (1973), Plutonium Ode: Poems 1977-1980 (1982), and Death and Fame: Last Poems 1993-1997 (1999). A winner of the National Book Award in 1974, Ginsberg also combined the roles of poet and prophet in the visionary mode of William Blake, but he also was an outspoken social critic and political activist who, nevertheless, combined these roles with that of practicing teacher and intellectual as a distinguished professor at Brooklyn College. He died of liver cancer in New York City at the age of seventy.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Burns, Glen. Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsburg's Poetry, 1943-1955. New York: Peter Lang, 1983.

Caveney, Graham. Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Broadway Books, 1999.

Hyde, Lewis, Ed. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.

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

Morgan, Bill. The Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941-1994: A Descriptive Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Sanders, Ed. The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem. Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2000.

Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER