Allen Ginsberg Influences

Ginsberg was institutionalized for a plea bargain when him and his friend stole some things from a University professor and was caught having some of the belongings in Ginsberg apartment while Solomon was in for depression, and suffers from delusion. Ginsberg compares his mother to Solomon “I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother” (96) Ginsberg’s mother was also institutionalized for recurrent epileptic seizures and paranoia and underwent numerous electrotherapy and lobotomy, she was hospitalized for 15-years (charters, 4)—this took a toll on Ginsberg life, he became traumatized which lead to problems in his adult

Ginsberg addressed the inner workings of his complicated mind through his poetry, but he also inspired his readers to do so as well. Ginsberg was notorious for representing a variety of controversial issues, but he was also a part of the drug scene as a means of expanding personal exploration towards questioning the human condition. In his travels alongside his partner, Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg was inspired by a variety of psychedelic drugs and the peaceful acceptance of Eastern religions to develop a “global consciousness” that challenged his native society (Schumacher). In the same way rock music of the counterculture combined different types of music, Ginsberg's poetry uniquely combined styles of poetry, religious influences, and drug-induced creative thought processes to question his reality living in a Christian-dominated society. One passage of “Howl” in particular reads, “I’m with

and his “best minds” pals encounter during a time after World War II. The “who” relates to Ginsberg

With reference to Ginsberg's emulation of Walt Whitman's content, the Norton Anthology, Postmodern American Poetry, states that, "Ginsberg proposed a return to the immediacy, egalitarianism and visionary ambitions of Blake and Whitman." (130). His poem "America" caters toward themes of democracy, something Whitman's poetry also does. Yet unlike Whitman, Ginsberg takes a more questioning stance on America and does not use his poem to praise the nation.

Many of the Beat writers wrote in a style known as spontaneous prose. Allen Ginsberg often writes in this style. He does so in the poem “Howl” in which he rants and raves about society via his friends – Jack Kerouac, Willaim S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlingetti, and Neil Cassidy to name a few, live. He discusses their poverty, civil disobedience, the ways that they fight society, and his personal fight against industrialization; he uses many images in order to allow the reader to understand his lifestyle, the lifestyle of his friends and points of view, specifically their rejection of society.

The Ginsberg family played a significant role is Ginsberg’s overall successes. Without their guidance and advice, he would not have been able to go as far as publishing his own book. Debra Ginsberg, his mother, was an extremely influential person in his life and vital to not only his educational success but his personal success as well. Without the support of a father figure, Ginsberg relied heavily on the help of other family members and even sought advice from his closet friends Matt and

Ginsberg asserted that the best minds were the underrepresented outcast. For example, Ginsberg states beginning of the poem, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix” (1-2). From the beginning of the poem, the reader would expect Ginsberg talking about intellectual people such as scientists, philosophers, inventors, etc. The best minds were regular people who had dreams and lived their life to the fullest. They would go to bars, look down on NY, talk about philosophy, do drugs, and be sexually active. It prevalent to our society

The Beat Writers as they were formally known mainly focused on subjects like, drugs, sexuality, religion and materialism. Ginsberg finds a way to revoke a response in all that read it through his explicit words, at the time edgy ideas and with his

The Beat Generation is a literary movement during the 1950s that consisted of male authors including the widely known Allen Ginsberg, who explored American culture in their poems. The Beat Generation could be described as misogynistic and patriarchal due to their exclusion of women and concerns confined to only male outcasts. In Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 “Howl”, he brings his audience’s attention to male outcasts in society. In her 2015 “Howl”, a critical response to Ginsberg’s “Howl”, Amy Newman explores the oppression outcasted women endure in a male-dominated culture through the allusions of an admired female poet, Ginsberg’s original stanza form, and utilizing diction to convey a woman's perspective antithetically to Allen Ginsberg's original.

The sheer audacity of a statement like this in 1955 has no comparison in present-day American society. In effect, Ginsberg was announcing himself as a criminal, a felon, and a traitor. Yet he antagonizes the situation further by saying, "You should have seen me reading Marx. / My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right." (P-M 369) Ginsberg's cynical nature shines here as he is pronounced sane by a doctor, who is probably certified by a federal department of medicine, when Senator McCarthy would have you believe that Communists are dangerous and/or mentally instable. It is also important to mention the reference made to marijuana in this passage. Ginsberg was an avid marijuana user and was at the forefront of the psychedelic revolution in the late 1960's, but it is apparent that he used the hallucinogen regularly almost a decade earlier.

Ginsberg’s work often represents a struggle for spiritual survival in a dehumanized, repressive society. This can be seen in his writing of “Howl”:

The Beat Generation of poets was created by a group of poets in the 1950s that were part of a new culture in literature. They chose to use their experiences in their writings which were widely criticized as well as loved by many readers. Two of the most influential Beat Poets of that Generation of writers were Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The Beat Generation poetry was the first poets to write about non-conventional subjects as well as using different forms of expression in their works. This generation of poets greatly influenced poets such as Anne Sexton, who wrote about personal experiences as well. The Beat Generation’s style of poetry have influenced many generations of poets after them.

Allen Ginsberg was one of the founding fathers of what is considered the Beat Generation and the Beat Movement. Throughout his entire life he wrote multiple poems which voiced his certain opinions and thoughts about what America had been going through at the time. American poet, writer, and philosopher, Allen Ginsberg uses his life experiences and ideas on resistance, freedom, and the Beat Movement to express specific ideas within his poems.

Several nonconformist American writers of the 1950s gave birth to the Beat Generation through their experimental writing, lifestyle, religious practises, and philosophies. Writers such as John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Gregory Corso advocators all critical to the movement. But “[a]t the core of the Beat culture were still-notable poets and literary figures like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom helped to build one of the first centers of Beat culture, in North Beach San Francisco” (Issitt 2). Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Allen Ginsberg’s collection of poems called Howl, in addition to Williams S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, were immensely influential. In 1952 John Holmes birthed the term “Beat Generation” through an essay on the

Walt Whitman is regarded as one of the most influential poets in American history while Allen Ginsberg was and still is considered a leading figure of the Beat Generation. Both of these poets have similar poetic tendencies even though they were almost a century apart from each other. Walt Whitman helped to inspire many literary descendants ranging from writers to poets alike. One of his most famous poems is in his book, “Leaves of Grass”, called “Song of Myself”. Allen Ginsberg can be considered one of Walt Whitman’s literary descendants due to the numerous similarities between “Song of Myself” and Ginsberg’s “Howl”, which is about the real experiences of Americans after World War II.