Irwin Allen Ginsberg. American poet, member of the beat movement of the fifties and the hippies of the sixties . Among his best-known works are the poem Howl in 1956 and Kaddish in 1961 , dedicated to his mother.
Biographical summary
He was born in Newark , United States , on June 3 , 1926. Son of an English teacher and a Russian schoolteacher , who remained in a mental hospital for years.
He attended Columbia University , from which he was expelled along with his classmates Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs . The three of them formed the core of the so-called beat movement (beat generation), which broke with academic aesthetics and carried out a genuine cultural revolution , clearly marked by its denunciation of the American way of life.
Path
Path
The publication (Howl, 1956 ) of the poem Howl (a song to madness and its lucidity, and a protest against mechanized and materialistic society), by Ginsberg, was the trigger that consolidated beat poetry and gave it concrete form, based on a very accentuated rhythm, with influences of jazz , which, in a total assimilation of avant-garde techniques and a return to a certain romantic conception, reflects a personal universe made of images that often turn the poem into a kind of psalmodic song of great expressive force.
Another of Ginsberg’s great creations is the long poem dedicated to his mother, Kaddish ( 1961 ), a personal, almost cathartic confession. Accompanying these two poems, he published a few songs, with a shorter meter and simpler expression, with such popular titles as The Weight of the World Is Love .
From 1960 onwards he left the United States and devoted himself to travelling around the world to recite his poems, like a true aedo, with a prophet’s beard, and working on whatever came his way.
His presence was often linked to scandal. In 1966 , for example, he was expelled from Poland after his secret diary was published. In 1963 his third book of poems, Reality Sandwiches , appeared, followed by new titles such as Planet News ( 1968 ) and The Fall of America ( 1972 ); in 1984 the volume Collected Poems , 1947-1980 , a compilation of his work, was published .
Death
He died in New York , United States , on April 5 , 1997 .