Product Description

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic ‘Howl’, which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, ‘Kaddish’; the searing indictment of his homeland, ‘America’; and the confessional ‘Mescaline’. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, they show why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18784 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was an American poet, best known for the poem Howl (1956), celebrating his friends of the Beat Generation and attacking what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, won the National Book Award for The Fall of America, and was a co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
Allen Ginsberg, an icon of the Beat Generation is here represented with the poems that helped to make him so iconic. In this selection we have poems from 1952-1960, containing probably his most famous works.

Whether Ginsberg is writing about drugs, the state of the world or his mother his poems talk to something deep down in our psyche. Howl is an absolute masterpiece, displaying something primal that we can all feel and understand. Indeed this poem had to fight obscenity laws but of course won when it was deemed by the judge to be a work of art and not vulgar. Kadish, his poem to his dead mother is very moving and is quite lengthy. This collection shows how Ginsberg can move through different emotions with consumate ease. Also we have Mescaline in this book, in which we hear about the author's use of drugs.

Whatever Ginsberg has written about in this collection he manages to reach deep down inside of us all, and it is easy to see why he has had such a great influence on so many people. When the Beat started up it was to answer the feelings of uncertainty and angst left by the end of the Second World War that was still being felt. With the recent problems with the financial markets people are starting to feel the same now, showing that he is still as relevant to us now as when he first wrote.