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Allen Ginsberg
Born: Newark, New Jersey
June 3, 1926
Died: New York, New York
April 5, 1997
Ginsberg was a visionary poet of American English whose singular use of language, rhythm, and subject made him a major
figure in the cultural, political, and literary life of the United
States.
George Holmes/Courtesy, Harper & Row
Biography
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New
Jersey, the second son of Louis Ginsberg, a lyric
poet and teacher, and Naomi Levy Ginsberg, a
teacher and political activist. His family moved to
Paterson, New Jersey, in 1929, the year his mother
was hospitalized for mental stress for the first time,
and Ginsberg attended primary school in Paterson. He published two pieces in the Easter issue of
the Central High School magazine, The Spectator,
his first public work, in 1941.
When he transferred to Eastside High School,
he became president of both the Debating Society
and the Dramatic Society before he graduated in
1943. He entered Columbia University as a pre-law
student, hoping to pursue a career in labor law,
and he studied with Lionel Trilling and Mark Van
Doren, who were partially responsible for shifting
his focus toward literature. His schoolmates at Columbia included Jack Kerouac, and he met William
Burroughs in New York City during his first year
there. With Kerouac and Burroughs, among others, Ginsberg formulated a philosophical discourse
which they called “The New Vision,” a precursor of
the Beat generation precepts he exemplified in his
later work.
At Columbia, he edited a humor magazine called
The Jester, was on the debate team, and helped run
the literary society. In 1945, he was suspended from
Columbia for permitting Kerouac to stay in his
room overnight, and he worked temporarily as a
welder, dishwasher, assistant at the Gotham Book
Mart, and apprentice seaman in the merchant marine. He was readmitted in 1946 and became assistant editor of the Columbia Review, in which he published poems, stories, and book reviews. Ginsberg
spent the summer of 1947 traveling to Colorado to
visit Neal Cassady, the model for Kerouac’s Dean
Moriarty character in On the Road (1957), and he
graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1948.
Later in that year, he had a vision of the English
Romantic poet William Blake speaking to him
directly—partially a product of Ginsberg’s fairly extensive experimentation with hallucinogenic substances, partially an expression of his intense literary and philosophical considerations of the nature
of the cosmos.
Although he had no intention to break the law,
Ginsberg became involved in several quasi-criminal activities as a part of an underground (or as
Kerouac called it, “subterranean”) existence, and,
following the counsel of several teachers at Columbia, he committed himself to an eight-month stay
in Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute as a
means of avoiding prosecution. During his stay he
met Carl Solomon, the man to whom “Howl”
(1956) is addressed, recognizing immediately a fellow enthusiast for avant-garde art and an unconventional life pattern.
After moving in with his father and stepmother
in 1950, he sent a letter and some poems to William
Carlos Williams, who was living nearby in Ruther889
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ford, New Jersey. Williams provided guidance and
encouragement, and while Ginsberg traveled to
Mexico and Europe during the early 1950’s, he
continued to work on his poetry. In 1953, he
moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which
was to become his home ground for the following
five decades, and worked as a copyboy at the New
York World-Telegram. He spent much of 1954 living in Mexico and then San Francisco, where he
worked briefly as a market researcher and met Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and publisher of City
Lights Books, which would issue Ginsberg’s poetry
for the following quarter century. In 1955, Ginsberg moved to Berkeley, California, where he
wrote his tribute to Walt Whitman, “A Supermarket in California” (1956), and organized the nowlegendary landmark reading of October 13 at the
Six Gallery, where he joined Gary Snyder, Philip
Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen to
read “Howl” in public for the first time. There, also,
he was introduced to Peter Orlovsky, who became a
close friend and sometime lover, a relationship
that endured, while becoming progressively contentious, for many decades. His mother, Naomi,
died in 1956, the year that Howl, and Other Poems
was published, and Ginsberg spent the following
two years traveling extensively, promoting the work
of friends, defending the Howl volume against
charges of obscenity, and working on “Kaddish,”
his celebration of his mother, published in 1961.
The media had discovered the artists whom they
grouped under the title “Beatniks” in the late
1950’s, and Ginsberg began to appear in magazines and films as an exemplar and proponent
of this literary movement. Ginsberg continued to
travel widely, reading and discussing the books that
he and his friends—Gregory Corso, LeRoi Jones
(later Amiri Baraka), Herbert Huncke, Diana di
Prima—were trying to publish. He and Orlovsky
visited Burroughs in Tangier in 1957, where he
took part in a group effort to pull together Burroughs’s huge “word hoard” as Naked Lunch (1959).
He spent time in South America and India in 1961
and 1962, before traveling to Great Britain where
he met and performed with the Beatles (as well as
Bob Dylan) in a now-legendary concert at London’s Albert Hall.
He revived his friendship with Cassady when a
bus driven by Cassady carried Ken Kesey, author of
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), and the Merry
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Pranksters across the United States to New York in
1964. In 1963, he published his third collection of
poems, Reality Sandwiches, as well as an exchange of
letters with Burroughs (The Yage Letters) on their experiences with the liquid mind-altering substance
yage. His interest in the use of materials such as this
led him to form LeMar (Organization to Legalize
Marijuana) in 1964 with the poet Ed Sanders. In
1965, he appeared in a proto-music video of
Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
Because of his often critical comments about
politics in the United States, the Communist governments of Cuba and Czechoslovakia invited
Ginsberg to visit under the mistaken assumption
that he would approve of their repressive regimes.
In 1965, Ginsberg visited Cuba and was expelled
when he challenged the totalitarian aspects of Cuban society, unsettling the puritanical Communist
regime with rampant erotic invitations. He then
visited Prague, where he was chosen “King of May”
by a hundred thousand Czechs before being expelled for his “unusual sex politics dream opinions,” as he put it in the poem “Kral Majales.”
At the same time that he was becoming increasingly specific about his differences with the U.S.
government about its policies in Vietnam, Ginsberg was also becoming a patron of sorts in forming the Committee on Poetry, a nonprofit foundation to assist other writers. In 1967, he was arrested
at an antidraft demonstration; he also interviewed
Ezra Pound, the most influential Modernist poet in
American literature, in Spoleto, Italy. Ginsberg
published Planet News in 1968, a volume including
all the poetry he had written in the 1960’s, and he
was directly involved in the massive political protests at the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago in the summer of 1968, acting as a strong
voice for nonviolent expression amidst the increasing chaos of the demonstrations and police retaliation that disrupted the political program. He testified for the defense in the notorious trial of the
“Chicago Seven” following the convention.
As the 1960’s drew to a close, Ginsberg was becoming recognized more widely as an important
figure in American literature. In 1969, he was
awarded a National Institute of Arts and Letters
grant for poetry, and in 1971, he served as a judge
on the National Book Awards panel for poetry. In
the early 1970’s, he spent some time on a farm in
upstate New York and published The Fall of America:
Allen Ginsberg
Poems of These States, 1965-1971 (1972), poems written during the previous six years. His interest in
Buddhism, going back to his visit to India which
was presented in Indian Journals: March 1962-May
1963 in 1970, culminated in an acceptance of
the teaching of Buddha under the instruction of
Chögyam Trungpa, a religious figure from Tibet
who initiated him with the name “Lion of Dharma.”
In 1974, The Fall of America won the National Book
Award, and Ginsberg began to teach at the Naropa
Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a school he
named “The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of
Poetics.”
Continuing to work in areas not traditionally associated with conventional literary expression,
Ginsberg joined Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review as a percussionist-poet in 1975 and recorded
much of his own work, as well as some poetry by
Blake, with various types of musical accompaniment. In 1978, he published Mind Breaths and
joined a protest at the Rocky Flat nuclear trigger
factory, an activity that led to the composition of
his “Plutonian Ode.” As the decade closed, Ginsberg’s increasing celebrity and accomplishment
were honored by a gold medal from the National
Arts Club Academy and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ginsberg continued to travel, teach, and perform during the early 1980’s, publishing poems
written during the preceding three years in Plutonian Ode: Poems, 1977-1980 (1982) and then achieving stature as a major figure in American letters
with the publication of his Collected Poems, 19471980 in 1984, a volume received with wide attention and respect by both academic critics and the
national media. In 1986, he was appointed distinguished professor at Brooklyn College, and then
Professor at the Graduate Center of City University,
and published White Shroud, an epilogue to “Kaddish” plus other poems from the early 1980’s. In
1987, he appeared in several segments of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Voices and Visions series on American poets; as the decade drew to a
close, he began a collaboration with the composer
Philip Glass that led to a release in 1990 of a chamber opera called Hydrogen Jukebox (a phrase from
“Howl”), which placed many of his well-known poems in inventive musical settings. In 1993, he was
awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts
et Letters by the French minister of culture.
Ginsberg died of liver cancer in his apartment in
the East Village of lower Manhattan on April 5,
1997. His death drew an exceptional outpouring
of praise from many prominent members of the
American cultural community, as well as some typical disparagement from those who decried his undeniable influence on American letters. Ginsberg,
no longer considered a wild madman of language,
was recognized as a vibrant force in American culture, successful during his last years in the preservation of the legacy of the Beat writers, whose work
he taught, promoted, and celebrated. The tributes
that appeared on the occasion of his death were
both a testament to his work and an acknowledgement by a wide spectrum of the American cultural
community of his exceptionally generous support
of other artists and his consistent encouragement
of all those who were trying to sustain the humane
values that he advocated in his life and art.
Analysis
When “Howl” was published, Ginsberg sent a
copy to his former teacher at Columbia University,
Lionel Trilling, a man widely regarded as one of
the foremost professors of American literature.
Trilling, who was fond of Ginsberg and wanted to
encourage him, wrote in May, 1956, “I’m afraid I
have to tell you that I don’t like the poems at all. I
hesitate before saying that they seem to me quite
dull . . . [but] I am being sincere when I say they are
dull.” The significance of Trilling’s reply is not simply that he was unable to appreciate an exceptional
poem but that he was unprepared to recognize the
qualities of an entire tradition in American literature. Trilling’s training and experience had prepared him to respond with intelligence and insight
to poems which the academic critical establishment regarded as important. The influence, however, of the New Critics—the writers who followed
the teaching of such men as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom—left
a line of poetic expression from Walt Whitman
through Ezra Pound and on to Charles Olson,
Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and
now Ginsberg essentially invisible.
When Ginsberg finished “Howl,” many poets
outside the academic and publishing network of
power were extraordinarily enthusiastic (Kenneth
Rexroth said that the poem would make Ginsberg
famous “bridge to bridge,” meaning across the en891
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tire American continent), but many critics and professors attacked it as formless and haphazard, the
work of an uneducated buffoon. This particularly
angered Ginsberg, who expected some misunderstanding but was especially disappointed that his
own careful analysis of poetry in the English language and his efforts to find an appropriate structure for his thoughts had been so completely
missed.
In addition to Trilling, Ginsberg sent a copy to
his old mentor William Carlos Williams with a letter pointing out “what I have done with the long
line,” his basic rhythmic measure, a unit of breath
which replaced the more familiar meter as a means
of organizing the images of the poem. He believed
that this “line” had what he called an “elastic” quality that permitted “spontaneity” and that its “rhythmical buildup” would lead to a “release of emotion,” a human quality which he believed had been
removed from the formal and often ironic stance
taken by twentieth century poetry.
Although Whitman obviously was one of his
models in his attempt to reclaim the life of an ordinary citizen as a subject as well as for his characteristically long-breath lines, Ginsberg also mentioned American poet Hart Crane and English
Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (citing his
1821 volume Epipsychidion, in particular) and William Wordsworth (“Tintern Abbey”) as influences.
While Ginsberg was describing his modernist
method of composition as “observing the flashings
on the mind” and casually dismissing most editing
by issuing the dictum “First thought, best thought,”
he also insisted on pointing out his lifelong familiarity with the traditional “bearded poets of the
nineteenth century” that he had read in his father’s home.
This solid background with conventional poetry was missed at first by critics who were overwhelmed by the originality of Ginsberg’s writing
and by his insistence on including all of his primary concerns—his amalgam of religions (Jewish/
Buddhist/Hindu), his homosexuality, his radical
politics, and his particular current literary enthusiasms—in his writing. When Ginsberg spoke of
“compositional self exploration,” he was challenging the idea that the poet worked everything out
beforehand and selected an approved form to contain his thoughts. Ginsberg was, instead, one of the
first proponents of Charles Olson’s well-known
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definition that “form is never more than an extension of content,” seeking to “graph the movement
of his own mind” without the limitations of grammatical, syntactical, or quasi-literary conceptions
about what was and was not poetic.
Ginsberg’s intentions were ultimately to remake
or restore American poetry, “to open the field” to
its fullest dimensions. The mass media’s misguided
view of Ginsberg as a somewhat pathetic jester
was obliterated by Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, 19471980, which made it clear just how much a part of
the main current of American poetry Ginsberg
had become. It was not a matter of Ginsberg’s ideas
replacing previous orthodoxy as a dominant mode
but rather of a recognition that the approaches
and ideas upon which Ginsberg insisted must be
given the serious attention they require. From the
sequence of what Ginsberg called “strong-breath’d
poems,” one might also derive a kind of counterstrain of lyrics which would not be “peaks of inspiration” in the most profound sense, but which exhibit Ginsberg’s zany, Keatonesque comic spirit
and his heartfelt commingling of sadness and
sweetness.
They also demonstrate his extremely sharp eye
for detail amid the intricate landscape of American
culture and his consistently inventive use of contemporary American speech on all levels, mixed
with a classic English-American diction. The poems included in this mode begin with “A Strange
New Cottage in Berkeley” and “A Supermarket in
California,” which Ginsberg describes as one poem
in two parts that he wrote to satisfy his curiosity
about whether “short quiet lyrical poems could be
written using the long line.” The poignance of
Ginsberg’s lament in “A Supermarket in California” for the promise of an earlier America still alive
among symbols of contemporary American decay,
and his homage to Whitman in the poem’s conclusion, in which he addresses Whitman as “lonely old
courage-teacher,” evoke a mood of lyric innocence
that is sustained by poems throughout his career.
The comic nature of Ginsberg’s work, often using his poetic persona as the source and object of
the joke, is evident in poems such as “Yes and It’s
Hopeless” (1973), “Junk Mail” (1976), “Personals
Ad” (1990), and especially in “I Am a Victim of
Telephone” (1964), where his reveries are constantly interrupted by the telephone, which demands he respond immediately because “my hus-
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band’s gone my boyfriend’s busted forever my
poetry was/ rejected.” Because Ginsberg is essentially serious, however, his use of comic situations
tends to underscore and to temper his earnestness
so that when he vows in “America” (1956) that “I’m
putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,” his humor works as both a defense against a hostile world
and as an expression of his modesty beneath his almost epic claims. In addition, the comic moods of
his poems are often a product of his sheer delight
in the weirdness of existence, another aspect of his
ultimately optimistic and even exuberantly enthusiastic response to the world.
A major part of Ginsberg’s world has always
been his friends and literary companions, and
they, too, figure prominently in his poetry. Cassady,
Orlovsky, Kesey, and Burroughs are mentioned in
various poems and dedications to collections, but
the poem that unites generations of artists with a
similar sensibility is “Death News” (1963). Ginsberg, upon learning of William Carlos Williams’s
death, recalls an earlier occasion when he, Kerouac,
Corso, and Orlovsky sat “on sofa in living room”
and asked for “wise words.” Williams’s wisdom—
“There’s a lot of bastards out there”—moves Ginsberg toward a celebration of the older poet in
which he recognizes Williams’s ability to retain
humaneness in his life and art even though he
is aware of the “bastards.” From this lesson, Ginsberg proceeds to a series of reconciliations, including the theological (conflicting religious backgrounds), the local with the eternal, and most
important in this context, the generational, as
there is a mutuality of feeling and respect between
the poets of two ages.
A similar Whitmanic generosity of spirit is displayed in “Who Be Kind To” (1965), a poem in
which Ginsberg goes beyond the sympathy he extends to his friends to offer love to an often hostile
environment. The community of underground
artists with whom Ginsberg began his writing has
broadened to include many members of the more
traditional cultural enclaves, but there is still a very
destructive force at large in the United States that
Ginsberg has always opposed; in poems such as
“Bayonne Entering NYC” (1966) or “Death on All
Fronts” (1969), the ugliness and lethal pollution of
the world is presented as a sickness to be challenged with the mind-awakening strength of the
soul. This is what Ginsberg always tried to do in his
poetry, beginning with “Howl,” which identified
and described the psychic disaster, on through all
the other poems that have uncovered and examined fears and desires denied and repressed and
have then demanded that these impulses be accepted as a part of the totality of human experience.
“Howl”
First published: 1956 (collected in Howl,
and Other Poems, 1956, 1996)
Type of work: Poem
The poet laments the loss of sensitive young
people destroyed by society, castigates the forces
behind the destruction, and concludes in a spirit
of affirmation.
When Ferlinghetti heard “Howl” for the first time,
he wrote Ginsberg a note asking for the manuscript
so that he could publish it and repeated Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s words to Walt Whitman upon the
publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855: “I greet you
at the beginning of a great career.” Many others
shared his enthusiasm.
The tremendous energy that Ginsberg had generated with his images and gathered with his rhythmic structure was impossible to avoid, but while
those who were open to
all the possibilities of “language charged with meaning” (in Ezra Pound’s famous phrase) were excited and inspired by the
poem, a very strong counterreaction among academic critics and others
frightened or appalled by
Ginsberg’s subject matter and approach produced
some very harsh criticism.
Norman Podhoretz attacked “Howl” for “its glorification of madness, drugs and homosexuality,
and . . . its contempt and hatred for anything and
everything generally deemed healthy, normal or
decent.” Ginsberg felt that the poem spoke for itself in terms of his ideas and attitudes, but what
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Allen Ginsberg
bothered him was how the poetic qualities behind
its composition seemed to have been overlooked in
the furor. Even if he saw himself as a poet who, in
the ancient sense, was a prophet who offered insight which could guide his race, he was, initially, a
poet. Therefore, it was his “craft or sullen art” (as
Dylan Thomas put it) which he offered as his proclamation of intention, and when it was misunderstood, Ginsberg explained or taught the poem
himself.
His work prior to 1955 had consisted primarily
of imitations of earlier poets or variations on early
modernist styles. Then, in a crucial moment of selfawareness, he decided “to follow my romantic inspiration—Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath.” His
plan was to write down (or “scribble”) images flashing across his perceptual circuits in an overview of
his entire life experience. From the famous first
line, “I saw the best minds of my generation . . . ,”
Ginsberg compressed or condensed the life stories
of his acquaintances—students, artists, drop-outs,
madmen, junkies, and other mutants deviating
from the conventional expectations of the muted
1950’s into what he called “a huge sad comedy of
wild phrasing.” He used the word “who” to maintain a rhythmic pulse and to establish a base from
which he could leap into rhapsodic spasms of language:
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high
sat up smoking
in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats
floating
across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.
When he realized that it would be difficult to
sustain such a long line, he juxtaposed disparate
items and elements in a kind of verbal associative
collage. He likened his technique to a haiku that
involved a clash of images which maintained an element of mystery while putting “iron poetry back
into the line.” The first part of the poem was designed to be a lament for what Ginsberg felt were
“lamblike youths” who had been psychically
slaughtered by American society, and it was conceived in a “speechrhythm prosody to build up
large organic structures.”
In the second section, Ginsberg identified “an
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image of the robot skullface of Moloch,” which he
used as a symbol for the devouring power of every
destructive, inhuman, and death-driven feature of
American life. His plan was to use a version of a
stanza form, which he divided further by inserting
and repeating the word “Moloch” as a form of
punctuation; within each stanzaic unit, he defined
the attributes of Moloch in order to form a picture
of what he called “the monster of mental consciousness.” Ginsberg builds this section to a climax of exclamation before temporarily releasing
some of the accumulated tension in a vision of a
breakdown or breakthrough where the social contract can no longer bind the diverse impulses of energy into any coherent arrangement. The lingering effect of the section is
that of a ritual of exorcism,
an incantation that develops a spell of sorts through
the effect of a chant that
alters consciousness.
Part 3 takes as its subject Carl Solomon, an old
friend of Ginsberg from
the time he spent in the
Columbia Psychiatric Institute, who is the conspectus of all the “best minds”
of part 1, a victim/hero
of modern American life
to whom Ginsberg pledges a unity of spiritual allegiance in his incarceration in Rockland Mental
Hospital. Ginsberg took the form of this section
from Christopher Smart, whose poem “Jubilate
Agno” (“rejoice in the lamb”) of the eighteenth
century used a statement-counterstatement stanza
which Ginsberg appropriated so that “I’m with you
in Rockland” is followed by “where . . .” in a “litany
of affirmation.”
Ginsberg described the third part as “pyramidal,
with a graduated longer response to the fixed
base,” and the last image of the poem depicts Solomon at the door of Ginsberg’s “cottage/ in the
Western night.” The poem does not end with a
period, however, suggesting the almost utopian
hopes for a better future which Ginsberg maintained. Even if the poem now seems almost overwrought in spots, it contains the central concerns
of Ginsberg’s work: the intense interest in sound
appropriate to a poet firmly in the oral tradition, a
Allen Ginsberg
fierce condemnation of the worst of American politics, a commitment to an explicit statement of
erotic intention, and a rapturous reaction to the
wonder of the universe akin to religious ecstasy.
“Kaddish”
First published: 1961 (collected in Kaddish,
and Other Poems, 1958-1960, 1961)
Type of work: Poem
The poet offers the traditional Jewish prayer for
the dead as a celebration of his mother’s life and
his feeling for her suffering.
One of the central formative experiences of Ginsberg’s life was the decline into mental illness of his
mother, Naomi, a wrenching psychic ordeal that he
internalized for the first four decades of his life before confronting his feelings in the poem “Kaddish,” which he composed in bursts of confessional
exhilaration from 1958 through 1961. The trigger
for the central narrative section of the poem, a
biographical recollection of his mother’s life, was a
night spent listening to jazz, ingesting marijuana
and methamphetamine, and reading passages
from an old Bar Mitzvah book.
Ginsberg then walked out into New York City,
and with his mind racing with the rhythms of the
Hebrew prayers, he found himself covering the
same ground his mother had known in her early
youth. As his thoughts turned to her life, and to his
inability to talk to her directly as an adult, he remembered that she had been buried three years
before without the traditional Kaddish, the prayer
for the dead. Determined to honor her memory
before God, to face his own doubts about death
and about his relationship with his mother, and to
come to terms with his life to that point, Ginsberg
began with a direct exposition of his feelings,
“Strange now to think of you, gone,” and withheld
nothing as he re-created the full emotional depth
of their life together.
“Kaddish” is both an extended elegy and a dual
biography. For the poet himself, it is a “release of
particulars,” the “recollections that rose in my
heart,” which he views with a mixture of lingering
nostalgia for childhood and a dread of how details
apprehended in innocence take on a darker cast
when seen in terms of the course of a person’s life.
His own journey from early youth to his present
middle age is a parallel to the path that Naomi took
from a youthful beauty, “her long hair wound with
flowers—smiling—playing lullabies on mandolin,”
to Naomi “At forty, varicosed, nude, fat, doomed.”
Her mental illness and paranoia, which baffled and
frightened him in his youth, are now a lurking
threat to his own mental stability, especially as he
has experienced visions and hallucinations of awesome power. The direction of their lives, of everyone’s life, is toward “the names of Death in many
mind-worlds,” and it is this awesome certainty that
has driven Ginsberg to open the paths to his subconscious. Rebuked by his mother’s madness in
life, and by her silence now, the poet thinks with
gratitude of his mother no longer suffering, but he
realizes that he will not find any kind of peace because he still has not “written your history.”
The central incident in the second section concerns the trip that the twelve-year-old Ginsberg
took with his mother on a public bus to a rest home.
The awful implications of unpredictability and
confusion in the presence of one who is supposed
to provide stability turn the child into a quasi-adult
but one without guidance or education. While not
blaming himself for his inability to handle the situation, he knows (even at the age of fifteen) that
an inescapable incursion of the chaotic has been
planted in his mind. In this lengthy narrative, carried along image by image through the power of
Ginsberg’s language, the world in which the poet
developed his mind and began to shape his art
comes into focus. It is a picture of American life in
the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, and as Naomi retreats into mental illness, Ginsberg recalls how his
political ideals, nascent poetic instincts, and sense
of himself grew toward the poet who is writing this
psychic history.
As the section concludes, Ginsberg turns his
complete attention to his mother, indicating her
madness by the seemingly logical but disjointed
fragments of her conversation that he reproduces
and using the power of very graphic physical details of the body’s collapse as a metaphor for the decay of the mind. The extreme frankness with which
Ginsberg describes his mother in a state of increasing deterioration is jolting in its candor, but it also
functions as a seal of authenticity, implying an over895
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all veracity, as the most painful of memories have
been reconstructed.
The long decline that his mother suffered is so
stunning that the poet is moved to prayer in the
face of his helplessness, introducing the literal Hebrew words of the Kaddish, providing the prayer
that the world withheld at her death. His own contribution, though, is not only to create a context of
appropriateness for the ancient words but also to
supply in language his own appreciation of his
mother’s best qualities. As the long second section
moves toward a conclusion, Ginsberg employs a familiar poetic motif, setting the power of language
in celebration of the beautiful against the agony of
circumstance. Returning to some of the more traditional features of the elegiac mode (modeled on
Shelley’s Adonais, 1821), which he has held in reserve, Ginsberg declares:
holy mother, now you smile on your love,
your world is born anew, children run naked in the
field spotted with dandelions,
and sings,
O glorious muse that bore me from the womb,
gave suck first mystic
life & taught me talk and music, from whose pained
head I first took Vision—
and concludes:
Now wear your nakedness forever, white flowers in your hair, your marriage
sealed behind the sky
—no revolution might destroy that maidenhood—
O beautiful Garbo of my Karma.
The closing lines of this part quote a letter that
Ginsberg received from his mother only days before her final stroke, in which she tells him “the
key” is “in the sunlight in the window.” The image
of light immediately precedes her salutation,
“Love,/ your mother,” that Ginsberg ratifies, “which
is Naomi—” as an acknowledgment of his own love.
The last section of the poem is called “Hymmnn,”
and it is divided into three parts. The first is a
prayer for blessing that examines the “key” image,
the second a recapitulation of some of his mother’s
attributes in a catalog of her characteristics, and
the third what Ginsberg called “another variation
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of the litany form” in which the poem ends in waves
of “pure emotive sound” varying the words “Lord
lord lord” and “caw caw caw.” The poem is not really
complete for Ginsberg, as he added a reflection on
it in “White Shroud” (1983) and suggested that
other parts might appear as well. It is not a really difficult poem, but it is not a comfortable one either,
and in resisting all the temptations to use centuries
of sentimental associations with motherhood, Ginsberg has placed an archetypal relationship in a
vivid and original light, reaching depths of feeling
rarely touched except in the most powerful art.
“Kral Majales”
First published: 1965 (collected in Kral
Majales, 1965)
Type of work: Poem
In accepting the Czechoslovakian honor of
“King of May,” Ginsberg attacks the evils of both
communism and capitalism and extols the lifegiving powers of art.
Among the links in the “chain of strong-breath’d
poems,” “Kral Majales” contains some of Ginsberg’s
strongest affirmations of human love as a force sufficient to overcome the powers of evil. The poem
was written in May, 1965, after Ginsberg had been
“sent from Havana” when his hosts found that he
was not sympathetic to their suppression of unconventional behavior, and then “sent from Prague”
when the authorities became nervous that a hundred thousand Czech citizens were deliriously cheering a bearded, anarchic American poet who was advocating action directly opposed to the political
workings of their drab dictatorship. Ginsberg had
been chosen as King of May by students and intellectuals in an ancient custom that had endured centuries of upheaval and conquest by foreign empires.
The poem begins as a comic rant juxtaposing
the foolishness of capitalists who “proffer Napalm
and money in green suitcases to the Naked” with
his disappointment in the actuality of a communist
government after hearing his mother “reading patiently out of Communist fairy book.” Instead of a
worker’s paradise, the Communists “create heavy
industry but the heart is also heavy.”
Allen Ginsberg
After a balance of images condemning the idiocy of both sides, Ginsberg shifts the tone of the
poem completely; he sets against the darkness
of modern industrial decay at its most deadly the
life-giving properties of the office with which he
has been honored and which he honors in the
poem. In a great list, he describes the King of
May—himself, in this current incarnation—as a
mythic savior who offers the powers of art, love, invention, true religion, and the excitement of language in action. Using the phrase “I am” to keep
the beat, his long line pulses with energy; the
method of juxtaposition utilized in “Howl” is even
more concentrated and direct:
And I am the King of May, which is the power of
sexual youth,
and I am the King of May, which is industry in
eloquence and action in amour,
and I am the King of May, which is long hair of
Adam and the Beard of my own body
and I am the King of May, which is Kral Majales in
the Czechoslovakian tongue,
and I am the King of May, which is old Human
poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name.
Ginsberg goes on to cite his other qualifications, including an inclusive, ecumenical vision of religion,
labeling himself a “Buddhist Jew/ who worships
the Sacred Heart of Christ the blue body of Krishna
the straight back of Ram/ the beads of Chango the
Nigerian singing Shiva Shiva in a manner which I
have invented.” “Kral Majales” concludes with the
almost breathless excitement of the poet arriving
at “Albion’s airfield” still vibrating with the excitement of the poem’s composition.
“On Cremation of Chögyam
Trungpa, Vidyadhara”
Allen Ginsberg’s poem celebrating the life and
teachings of Chögyam Trungpa, “On Cremation of
Chögyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara,” was written as a
heartfelt tribute to his spiritual guide on the occasion of the burial ceremony conducted in Vermont
by friends and students. Ginsberg’s description of
the events of the afternoon is designed to convey
the inspirational effect of his teacher’s life in the
evocation of the exuberant mood of the gathering.
Using a characteristic signature phrase similar to
those in other well-known poems, “I noticed . . . ,”
Ginsberg adopts the position of a keen-eyed commentator, both involved and able to maintain a
perspective with sufficient distance to acknowledge the power and providence of Trungpa’s wisdom and example.
Beginning with a view of the terrain (“I noticed
the grass, I noticed the hills”), the poem is structured as an inward spiral, moving steadily closer to
the ceremony, as the poet becomes a part of the celebration. He moves among the spectators arriving,
their dress and appearance indicative of the diverse population that was drawn to the guru. Then,
the poet tightens the focus, highlighting the distinctive details that form the image-pattern of the
poem. Color (“amber for generosity, green for karmic works”), texture (“silk head crowns & saffron
robes”), and sound (“monks chanting, horn plaint
in our ears”) create an ambience of reverence and
respect, charged with the energy practically pouring from the devotees, their families and friends.
The poet registers the force of the celebration in
his physical response to the myriad stimuli (“I noticed my own heart beating”), a full-body experience that is fused with his intimations of the eternal, expressed in a reversal of narrative direction
back toward the outer edges of the scene, with the
enduring elements of the natural world (“a misted
horizon, shore &/ old worn rocks in the sand”)
leading toward a feeling of ecstasy, as the poem
concludes with an exultant “I wanted to dance.”
First published: 1987 (collected in
Cosmopolitan Greetings, 1994)
Type of work: Poem
The poet evokes a mood of spiritual
transcendence in his description of the ritual
cremation of the teacher who guided him on a
journey of philosophical exploration.
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Allen Ginsberg
“Fun House Antique Store”
First published: 1992 (collected in
Cosmopolitan Greetings, 1994)
Type of work: Poem
The poet relishes the “minute particulars” of
the moment, exemplified by the unique and
appealing objects he finds in an antique shop on
a roadside near Washington, D.C.
Recalling the catalogue of abundance that begins
“A Supermarket in California,” “Fun House Antique Store” conveys a similar feeling of excitement
at the marvels available to an American citizen
among the fundamental things of the American
nation. In this poem, it is the apparently mundane
objects of life along the road that Ginsberg, in the
tradition of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, sees
with delight as he has been “motoring through
States” on the way to an event at the nation’s capital. No longer the “isolato” (as Whitman described
himself) of the time in 1955 when he was about to
publish “Howl” and enter the consciousness of his
country, Ginsberg is now prominent enough to be
traveling “through Maryland to see our lawyer in
D.C.,” but he has retained his ability to recognize
the manifestations of the warmly human amid a
bleak and forbidding environment, something he
did regularly in poems such as “Bayonne Entering
NYC.”
Applying his sharp eye for the telling detail,
Ginsberg evokes the feeling of an old dwelling
made inviting by the accumulation of objects and
devices that represent the substance of countless
lives. Admiring the “old-fashioned house,” Ginsberg leads the reader on a tour, beginning with an
entry past “Flower’d wallpaper, polished banisters/
lampshades dusted, candelabra burnished” that
Bibliography
By the Author
poetry:
Howl, and Other Poems, 1956, 1996
Empty Mirror: Early Poems, 1961
Kaddish, and Other Poems, 1958-1960, 1961
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sets the location within the flow of time’s passage.
Then, in a profusion of images that extend and
deepen the mood of the house, he presents item after item as they appear: “washbowls beside the
French doors/ embroidered doilies & artificial
flowers/ ivory & light brown on mahogany/ side tables, a brass bowl for cards,/ kitchen with polished
stove cold ready/ at Summer’s end to light up with
split/ wood & kindling in buckets beside/ the
empty fireplace, tongs & screen/ in neat order.”
The second floor is presented with similar attention to detail, until the poet is so overcome with
the pleasure of contemplation that he declares, “I
wished to make a speech,” and while his praise is
not readily acknowledged (“attendants conferred/
minds elsewhere”), one person “applauded our appreciation,” perhaps a figure for the often limited
but discerning audience that the poet finds and for
which he is grateful even now, somewhat famous,
with his “party on its way to the postmodern Capital.”
Summary
Ginsberg worked in the tradition begun by Walt
Whitman, in which the poet is not only a master of
language and literature but also a singer whose
voice carries the spirit of a nation’s speech and
thought. A self-proclaimed “poet as priest” whose
congregation was his country’s citizenry, Ginsberg
never lost sight of his initial vision of a cosmos
where the full range of human possibility can be
made manifest through the unrestricted explorations of the mind and body. In opposition to the
evils of the modern age, Ginsberg tried to create a
kingdom of love leading toward a utopian universe
that is alive in his poetry. Like Whitman, the “dear
father graybeard” who guided him, he never lost
the courage to proclaim his heart’s truth in his poetry.
Leon Lewis
Allen Ginsberg
The Change, 1963
Reality Sandwiches, 1963
Kral Majales, 1965
Wichita Vortex Sutra, 1966
T.V. Baby Poems, 1967
Airplane Dreams: Compositions from Journals, 1968
Ankor Wat, 1968
Planet News, 1961-1967, 1968
The Moments Return, 1970
Ginsberg’s Improvised Poetics, 1971
Bixby Canyon Ocean Path Word Breeze, 1972
The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971,
1972
Iron Horse, 1972
The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems, 1948-1952, 1972
Open Head, 1972
First Blues: Rags, Ballads, and Harmonium Songs,
1971-1974, 1975
Sad Dust Glories: Poems During Work Summer in Woods,
1975
Mind Breaths: Poems, 1972-1977, 1977
Mostly Sitting Haiku, 1978
Poems All over the Place: Mostly Seventies, 1978
Plutonian Ode: Poems, 1977-1980, 1982
Collected Poems, 1947-1980, 1984
White Shroud: Poems, 1980-1985, 1986
Hydrogen Jukebox, 1990 (music by Philip Glass)
Collected Poems, 1992
Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems, 1986-1992, 1994
Making It Up: Poetry Composed at St. Marks Church on
May 9, 1979, 1994 (with Kenneth Koch)
Selected Poems, 1947-1995, 1996
Death and Fame: Poems, 1993-1997, 1999
nonfiction:
The Yage Letters, 1963 (with William Burroughs)
Indian Journals, 1963
Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963: Notebooks, Diary, Blank Pages, Writings, 1970
Gay Sunshine Interview, 1974
Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, 1974
Visions of the Great Rememberer, 1974
To Eberhart from Ginsberg, 1976
As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg
and Neal Cassady, 1977
Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties, 1977, 1992
Composed on the Tongue: Literary Conversations, 19671977, 1980
Allen Ginsberg Photographs, 1990
Discussion Topics
• When Allen Ginsberg asserted in “Howl”
that he would be describing the “best
minds of a generation,” he was establishing a set of criteria for individual experience that challenged some familiar and
generally accepted standards for personal
behavior. What are some of the more
prominent values that his work supports?
What are some of the personal preferences that drew particularly virulent criticism from some cultural commentators?
• One of the most appealing aspects of Ginsberg’s poetry is his comic capacity. He often regards himself as a figure of fun, even
in serious statements. Locate and identify
examples of his comic sense, and consider
how they operate in the creation of an aesthetic sensibility.
• In “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg depicts two poets dreaming of “the
lost America of love.” What are some of the
most significant attributes of this “nation”
that Ginsberg mentions and elucidates in
his poetry?
• Ginsberg explained that “Wales Visitation”
was a poem written to convey the essence
of the psychedelic experience. How does
Ginsberg use images to express the dimensions of his psychological mood? How
does this correspond to the kind of visionary mental condition that he admires in
poets such as William Blake?
• One of the most important factors in Ginsberg’s development as a poet was his relationship with his parents. How does he describe and attempt to come to a resolution
of tension with his mother’s life in “Kaddish” and other poems?
• Among other terms, Ginsberg described
his religious inclinations as a “Buddhist
Jew.” What are some of the religious precepts and principles which can be drawn
from his poems?
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Allen Ginsberg
Snapshot Poetics: A Photographic Memoir of the Beat Era, 1993
Journals Mid-Fifties, 1954-1958, 1995
Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, 2000
Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, 2001 (with Louis Ginsberg)
Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996, 2001
edited text:
Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, 2000
miscellaneous:
Beat Legacy, Connections, Influences: Poems and Letters by Allen Ginsberg, 1994
About the Author
“Allen Ginsberg.” In The Beats: A Literary Reference, edited by Matt Theado. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004.
Hyde, Lewis, ed. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.
Kashner, Sam. When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
McDarrah, Fred W. A Beat Generation Album. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2003.
Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Paris: 1958-1963. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
_______. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
Molesworth, Charles. “Republican Objects and Utopian Moments: The Poetry of Robert Lowell and Allen
Ginsberg.” In The Fierce Embrace. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979.
Morgan, Bill, ed. The Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941-1994: A Descriptive Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995,
Morgan, Bill, and Bob Rosenthal, eds. Best Minds: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg. New York: Lospecchio, 1986.
Mottram, Eric. Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties. London: Unicorn Press, 1972.
Portuges, Paul. The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ross-Erikson, 1978.
Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
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