Allen Ginsberg Biography

Allen Ginsberg, while certainly intriguing in regards to his literary work, also has an extremely captivating life story. He grew up in the 1920s & 1930s in Newark, New Jersey, born to a father who was an American poet/teacher and a mother which had recently emigrated to the US from Russia. Ginsberg, after taking up the poems of Whitman in high school, attended the University of Columbia, where he shortly met the former Columbia students William Burroughs & Jack Kerouac, men who later would become, along with Ginsberg, major influencers in “a revolutionary cultural movement.” After being involved in a robbery after graduating Columbia Ginsberg spent time at mental health facilities, after he pleaded insanity in order to avoid jail time. Ginsberg

Despite the poem being considered by many to be too obscene, with Ginsberg even being tried for its content, resulting publicity and a strong message put Ginsberg and his work into the national spotlight (“Allen Ginsberg Biography”). This spotlight was used by Ginsberg to focus on many of the issues considered to be the most important in regards to the Beat Generation/Movement: sexuality (Ginsberg was also homosexual), censorship, drug decriminalization, rock & roll as an art form, ecological consciousness (respecting the natural world), and opposition to the industrial-militarial machine civilization among other issues and themes present within American society (Ginsberg, Definition of the Beat

In this regard beat poems were unflinching in regards to controversial topics, with the solution generally outlined as ditching large institutions & conformity in favor of allowing this behavior to become accepted and even celebrated. This viewpoint of Beat Poets can also be phrased in regards to the necessity of poetry during a social crisis: that poetry is in place to address the problem head on and inform general society about the problem and how to fix