Allen Ginsberg

General Notes (various sources):

• Ginberg's Howl and Kerouac's On the Road -- and even Burrough's Naked Lunch -- are essential texts for the "Beat" Generation -- much like Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden are essential texts for Transcendentalism.
• The mentions of Walt Whitman are very important:
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, also a poet, introduced Walt Whitman to the reading public, much like William Carlos Williams, another poet, introduced Allen Ginsberg to the reading public
  • Whitman was also known for his long poetic lines, his use of everyday speech, his enumerations or lists in his poems, his "oceanic vision" of poetry and America, and his role as a poet -- Ginsberg's poems are described as "an oceanic prose sometimes as sublime as an epic line"
• The mentions of William Blake are also very important -- especially for Blake's "auditory visions"
  • The central conversion experience of Ginsberg's life was an "auditory vision" of the English poet William Blake reciting his poems
• "Ginsberg's New York career has passed into mythology" -- and even his San Francisco career -- and this is much like Sylvia Plath's career -- and the mythologies threaten to overwhelm and overshadow the literature itself
• He was a homosexual and had wide experiences with drugs
• He responded to Burroughs' liberated way of life, to his comic-apocalyptic view of American society, and to his bold literary use of autobiography -- which connects the Beats to the Confessional Poets
• Ginsberg was drawn to San Francisco -- to its "long honorable tradition of Bohemian, Buddhist, mystical, anarchist social involvement"

Biographical Notes (source: Hart):

• He graduated from Columbia in NYC
• He found his voice in San Francisco during the time of the "Beat" movement
• He traveled widely, freely expressing his anti-authoritarian views as well as his belief in Zen Buddhism, which made him the guru for a new generation, a cult figure for "drop outs" of all ages who espoused the romantic, mystic, and pacifistic idea of "flower power" -- a phrase Ginsberg coined
• He was a special sort of spokesman for the 1960s