Allen Ginsberg

Abstract

Allen Ginsberg nowadays looks like a successful Jewish dentist since he cut his hair and beard and donned suit and tie at the instigation of his Guru Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. As the half-title page of his Collected Poems notes, he is a ‘Member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute’¹ and he describes himself gleefully in an interview with Jim Burns as ‘a most respectable figure’.² A founder member of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, circa 1944, Ginsberg is still best known for Howl, Kaddish and the poems of his first ten years or so as a public figure. (The early poems written from 1945 to 1952 did not appear until 1972 as Gates of Wrath, since the ‘ms was carried to London by lady friend early fifties, it disappeared and I had no complete copy till 1968 when old typescript was returned thru poet Bob Dylan — it passed into his hands years earlier’.)³ Although Ginsberg clearly belongs to that neo-modernist grouping which derives its poetics from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, he is a more social and political poet than either. He also derives parts of his poetics from William Blake, from the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, the French Surrealists, Cézanne (whom he studied at Columbia with Meyer Shapiro), Herman Melville, Céline, and fellow Beats Kerouac and Burroughs.