Allen Ginsberg: Biography Of This Beat Generation Poet
In 1956 a collection of poems appeared with the curious and disturbing title Howl. It was the first work of a young poet, Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), which was to forever mark the literary trajectory of the United States, as it would inaugurate the so-called Beat Generationone of the most demanding movements on the American scene of the 1950s.
Howl was not liked by all social sectors. His stark and explicit language sparked an avalanche of protests that ended with the play being banned. And that was the United States of the 1950s: a society that boasted of modernity but that, deep down, remained puritan and rigid, corseted in its most rancid customs.
Who was the author of such a bomb? What was the Beat Generation, and what did it mean to American culture? Today we tell you about the life of one of the most vindictive authors in the United States, Allen Ginsberg.
Brief biography of Allen Ginsberg, the most vocal poet of the Beat Generation
To be part of this generation of writers, several things were necessary. Among them, maintaining extreme sexual freedom, seeking inspiration in the East and making a staunch denunciation of American society. Allen Ginsberg, one of its founders, met each and every one of these “requirements”, to which was added the habitual consumption of drugs, such as peyote or the newly created LSD, under the influence of which he wrote some of the poems. of the.
Maternal absence
The absence of his mother, who spent much of her life locked up in a psychiatric center, probably marked young Allen’s childhood. Years later, when he was already an established author, he dedicated his work Kaddish (1961) to her, in which he recounts all the suffering and describes in detail maternal dementia.
Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, United States, in June 1926, son of Louis Ginsberg, an English teacher, and Naomi Ginsberg, a school teacher of Russian origin. Both were Jews, a religion that Allen would later renounce when he became a convinced and practicing Buddhist.
From a very young age, Allen Ginsberg was interested in books and displayed a remarkable and unusual sensitivity and intelligence, which would undoubtedly aggravate the impact that the mother’s illness had on her spirit. As a teenager he entered Columbia University in New York, but just a year later he was expelled from the institution along with two other classmates: William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouack (1922-1969), better known as Jack Kerouac.
The world didn’t know it yet, but These three young people would be the ones who would give impetus to a new poetic movement, inspired by the ruthless verses of the enormous Walt Whitman (1819-1892), but also by the unattainable beauty of modernism and a distant romanticism. The lost Eden.
The Beat Generation or the American revulsion
The Columbia trio was also joined by Lucien Carr (1925-2005), a committed journalist who had to leave the group in 1944, when he murdered a friend in a street fight and, convicted, had to enter a reform school. The Beat were then joined by Neal Cassady (1926-1968) and, later, among many others, Herbert Huncke (1915-1996), Carl Solomon (1929-1993) and Peter Orlovsky (1933-2010), who was for almost Allen’s partner was four decades old.
Free homosexuality is precisely one of the demands of the generation and of Ginsberg in particular The idea was to change the canons of American society and revolutionize it from its foundations. Therefore, the Beat Generation either Beat Generation He always proclaimed sexual freedom as a basic and indispensable element for the authentic freedom of the individual.
In addition, the members of the generation cried out against the irregularities and injustices of the United States government, especially against the numerous wars that were being carried out (Vietnam was a true reference in this sense). Allen Ginsberg in particular was a profound anti-militarist, as well as an avowed anti-capitalist. His open adherence to communism led to quite a few problems with the ever-vigilant US government (in 1984, for example, he was included on a list of citizens who were strictly prohibited from traveling abroad).
Although the members of the group had been writing and collaborating since the 1940s, It was the 1950s that consolidated the Beat Generation, through the publication of the first works of its most important authors. In 1951 Jack Kerouac published On the road (On the Road), a controversial work that he wrote in just twenty days and that even Allen Ginsberg himself recommended he not publish. For his part, Burroughs gave the public, in 1959, naked lunch (Naked Lunch), also described as obscene and banned in Boston until 1966.
In the middle of the decade, in 1956, Allen Ginsberg published his famous Howl. The first line of the work has gone down in the history of literature as one of the most devastating: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”). The echoes of Whitman are evident, as well as the almost infernal poetry of William Blake (1757-1827), from which Ginsberg also takes inspiration. Not in vain, in his lesser-known role as a composer, Allen set to music some of the Briton’s poems, such as Songs of Innocence.
The poem also captures the rhythmic drive of jazz, which imbues practically all Beat creation of the time. Not in vain, the word that designates the group refers both to the jazz rhythm and to the expression used to show deep sadness or fatigue, beat down. The Beat concept designates, therefore, a hard blow that leaves the individual absolutely annihilated And that is precisely what the members of the group considered American society to be doing.
howl It is considered one of the main works of the Beat Generation (although Ginsberg himself later declared not to belong to it), and the social uproar it caused contributed to increasing its fame and that of its author. The “obscenity” of his verses caused the work to be taken to trial. Ginsberg and other authors protested against this, taking refuge in the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which especially includes freedom of expression. Finally, the ban was lifted and the book could be marketed.
Another of the essential characteristics of the Beat Generation (and one that Ginsberg practiced until the end) was the approach to the East, in search of spiritual answers that Western society could no longer offer. Specifically, Allen was a follower of Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher. In general, his life was based on a supposed austerity that was reflected in his clothes, bought secondhand, or his wandering lifestyle from 1960 onwards, outside the United States.
The ideology beat had a much longer life than the decade in which it was born and formed Its members continued to write and fight against the war activities of the United States, as well as for sexual freedom and expression, a fact that significantly influenced later movements, such as, for example, the hippie movement.
In the same way, the approach to the East, in a desperate escape from “Western boredom”, was also characteristic of the new spiritual manifestations that began at the end of the 1960s and had their greatest apogee in the 1970s.
The Fall of America (The Fall of America), published in 1973 and with a more than explicit name, is probably Ginsberg’s most political work in which the always ruthless poet moves away somewhat from the sexual leitmotif and focuses on burning social issues, such as, for example, the Vietnam War, the great upheaval of American society in the early 70s.
Considered an authentic symbol of the youth movements of the mid-20th century, and with a more than controversial life behind him and no less controversial work, Ginsberg died in April 1997, about to turn 71. Liver cancer forever took away the most vocal poet of the 20th century in the United States.
