Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg, born June 1926 and died April 1997, is one of the 20th century’s most influential poets and a founder of the Beat Movement, His best known work is his long poem, ‘Howl’. He promoted gay rights at a time when homoseuxality was regarded with revulsion by many of the population of America, who saw it as contrary to God’s law.

Ginsberg was an important leader of the protest movement against the Vietnam War. He invented the term ‘Flower Power’ to describe the influence of symbols of peace. Despite his ‘countercultural’ background, he has become recognized as an important American writer and social commentator.

Ginsberg grew up New Jersey, the son of Jewish parents who fled pograms in Russia. His father, also a poet, supported the family through teaching. Allan attended Columbia University, where he met others who subsequently became known as the ‘Beat Generation’, including Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

Ginsberg graduated from Columbia in 1948, but his working life began inauspiciously, having been convicted as an accomplice in a robbery. To avoid jail time, Ginsberg pleaded insanity and received psychiatric care instead and then began working in advertising. In 1954, he moved to San Francisco and became part of the countercultural movement known as the Beat Movement. Its aims were anti-establishment and artistically anti-mainstream. Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ became the manifesto of the Beat Generation, exploring sexuality, social issues, and using non-traditional poetic form.

The poem was judged obscene by the establishment and Ginsberg was tried and vindicated; the verdict was that the composition had merit. The publicity raised awareness of Ginsberg and his work.

The 1960s were a productive time for Ginsbert who published several titles, including ‘Reality Sandwiches’ (1963) and ‘Planet News 1961-1967’ (1969). It was during this time that Ginsberg’s term ‘flower power,’ became popular, and was used to describe the Anti-Vietnamese War peace movement.

Ginsberg was, amongst other things, an advocate of drug use, a convert to Buddhism and a world traveller. In 1974 he won the National Book Award for ‘The Fall of America: Poems of these States 1965-1971’. In 1986 he received the Robert Frost Medal. In the 1980s and ‘90s he worked with musical artists like Philip Glass and the Clash.

Ginsberg died at the age of 70 in April 1997 of liver cancer.