Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and counterculture figure—one of the best known and innovative poets of the 20th century— and the most prominent poet of the Beat Movement of the 1950s. He was born in New Jersey on June 3, 1926, the son of poet Louis Ginsberg and Russian immigrant mother Naomi Ginsberg, who suffered from severe mental illness, the topic of one of his great poems, Kaddish. He went to Columbia University, where he befriended Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two other literary icons of what would come to be known as the Beat Generation. the counterculture movement. Published in 1956, Ginsberg’s long poemwork “Howl” was a key text infor the development of Beat Generation Movement, and he was taken to court for its purportedly obscene language. The judge ruled that the poem was protected by First Amendment rights, spurring Ginsberg toward a path of activism especially on the rights of free speech. Along with Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Ginsberg’s Howl remains the key iconic text of the Beat Generation. He became the sort of spokesperson for the Beatniks, and coined the term “flower power” to describe anti-war demonstrations. Ginsberg was a figurehead for the movement, but lived very humbly despite his fame, which was fitting given that much of his writing focuses on the universality of individual experiences. Although he was a dedicated denizen of New York’s East Village for many decades, Ginberg was also an extremely global author, as well as a photographer and activist; he spent long periods in Europe, South America and Asia, and even converted to Buddhism. After decades of several successful publications and passionate activism, in 1997, Ginsberg died of liver cancer.
Allen Ginsberg brought his incredible pathos and his great good humor to bear in poetry, creating a body of work that is humane, wise, playful, experiemental, explorative, and generous. He was one of the central poets in what came to be known as the Beat Generation, but which might also aptly be called the Fourth Great Awakening. He was a religious minded soul, who blended a deep knowledge of Buddhism and Hinduism, with his native Judaism and with a kind of rollicking American Transcendentalism which he shared with his great and perhaps singular forebear, Walt Whitman.