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Authors
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
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Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, 1947–1980 appeared in 1984, White Shroud: Poems, 1980– 1985 in 1986, and Death and Fame: Poems 1993–1997 in 1999. His individual volumes, with the exception of Empty Mirror (early poems collected in 1961), have been issued in the now unmistakable City Lights paperbacks. They include Howl and Other Poems (1956), Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958–1960 (1961), Reality Sandwiches (1963), Planet News, 1961– 1967 (1968), The Fall of America, Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (1973), and Mind Breaths, Poems 1972–1977 (1977). Cosmopolitan Greetings appeared in 1995 and Selected Poems 1947–1995 in 1996. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995 (2000) is a useful complement to the poetry. Ginsberg published a great number of pages from his journals, dealing with his travels, such as the Indian Journals (1970). Allen Verbatim (1974) includes transcripts of some of his lectures on poetry. In 1977 he published Letters: Early Fifties Early Sixties and in 1980 Composed on the Tongue: Literary Conversations 1967–1977, edited by Donald Allen. Ginsberg’s interviews are collected in Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996 (2001). Jane Kramer’s Allen Ginsberg in America (1969) is a brilliant documentary piece on Ginsberg in the 1960s. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Lewis Hyde (1980), is a collection of essays by different hands. Michelle Kraus has published Allen Ginsberg: An Annotated Bibliography, 1969–1977 (1980). Bill Morgan has published The Works of Allen Ginsberg 1941–1994: A Descriptive Bibliography (1995) and The Response to Allen Ginsberg 1926–1994: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources (1996).
Born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at Columbia University, Allen Ginsberg was one of the seminal poets of the Beat generation. His friendships with fellow authors William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac are legendary, especially their shared experiences in New York in the late 1940s. In the 1950s Ginsberg moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a market researcher before the City Lights Bookshop published his book Howl and Other Poems (1956). With its long, tumbling lines that represent the natural rhythms of thought, Howl celebrated the emerging counterculture and denounced America's conservatism. The poem became a manifesto for the Beats and Ginsberg emerged as an important social presence, reading his poetry at universities, campaigning for drug law reform, and participating in antiwar demonstrations. His volumes of poetry include Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960 (1961), The Fall of America, Poems of These States, 1965-1971 (1973), White Shroud: Poems, 1980-1985 (1986), and Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992 (1995).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Chroniclers of modern and contemporary American poetry often point to the 1955 San Francisco reading of Howl as a turning point in postwar verse, the beginning of new directions and modes. The Beats, as Ginsberg and other writers of the 1950s such as Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Burroughs came to be called, caught on with the public--including a public which had little experience with poetry and only vicarious interest in alternative lifestyles. Proclaiming his indebtedness to Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg nonetheless established himself as a major poet in his own right, with his own voice and verse forms.
1. Section I of Howl is one long sentence; section II is a sequence of exclamations; section III repeats the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland" eighteen times. Describe how these distinctly different sections contrast with one another tonally and thematically. How do they combine into one poem?
2. Section I of the poem may suggest Whitman strongly, especially those passages in Song of Myself in which Whitman offers us a tour of many different Americans and their work and personal experiences. Develop this comparison, and contrast the experience of reading Ginsberg with that of reading Whitman.
3. If Ginsberg and the Beats have strong connections back to American Romanticism and Transcendentalism, where are the redemptive moments in Howl? Is this a poem that celebrates life in some way? Where and how?
