Author Spotlight: Allen Ginsberg
- Max
- Jun 15
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 18
American poet and activist Allen Ginsberg was the voice of the post–World War II generation. His prime message was to fight materialism and conformity. He had his personally crafted style of poetry that combined traditional rhyme and rhythm techniques with a contemporary visionary approach.
Born on June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, he was raised in a Jewish family and referred to his parents as old-fashioned. His parents cultivated a love for literature for him and his brother, Eugene. His mother, despite suffering from a mental illness, often told them her own bedtime stories. His father, on the other hand, recited Emily Dickinson around the house or verbally attacked T. S. Eliot for ruining poetry.
After high school, he initially attended Montclair State College. However, after being a scholar of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Paterson, he was able to study at Columbia University. There, Ginsberg had the opportunity to further his writing abilities and achieve literary feats. He contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal, wrote for the Jester humor magazine, received the Woodberry Poetry Prize, became the president of a literary and debate group called the Philolexian Society, and joined the Boar’s Head Society.
Ginsberg met several notable writers such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes during his first year at Columbia. They founded the Beat Generation, a cultural and literary movement during the post-World War II era. Along with Lucien Carr, they shared a vision of a new America following World War II, free from conformist restrictions. They referred to themselves as “beat,” as they experienced exhaustion from the conformity, materialism, and hypocrisy within the post-war American society. The movement became popular throughout the 1950s. Some of their most influential works include Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and Ginsberg’s Howl (1956).
It was during his senior year in college when Ginsberg decided to become a poet. It happened after his hallucination, hearing William Blake reciting the poem “Ah! Sun-flower,” which was said to be an influence of recreational drug use.
Ginsberg stayed on the East Coast up until 1953, when he went to Mexico, and then decided to settle in San Francisco. During this time, he embraced homosexuality and fell in love with a model named Peter Orlovsky. His 1955 long poem, “Howl for Carl Solomon,” was a celebration of his homosexuality and the marginalized.
That same year, Ginsberg became part of an iconic event in American poetry. He recited a part of his new poem at the Six Gallery reading, known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, with local poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia. He later had his poetry published in a volume titled Howl and Other Poems.
In 1957, Ginsberg left California and briefly lived in Paris with Orlovsky. They returned to the United States in 1958, this time moving to New York City. Ginsberg’s mother had passed two years previously. Bothered by the fact that he was unable to properly say goodbye, he wrote what is called his greatest poem, “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg.” The elegy followed a Jewish memorial tradition.
In the early ’60s, Ginsberg further experimented with visionary poetry while he and Orlovsky traveled around the world. While in India for two years, he learned meditation, marking his spiritual enlightenment. Since childhood, Ginsberg was vocal about political issues, so in the late ’60s, he coined the term “flower power,” which describes peaceful demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
Ginsberg's notable piece in the ’70s was The Fall of America: Poems of These States, which won him the 1974 National Book Award. His work continued to proliferate during the ’80s and the ’90s. It was in 1986 when he received the Robert Frost Medal.
He died on April 5, 1997, surrounded by friends and family. His last piece was “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)” (1997).
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