Bob Allen Motor

Born on June 3, 1926, Allen Ginsberg grew up in New Jersey with parents (his father a poet and his mother a political activist) that encouraged creativity (Charters, 60). He attended Columbia University in New York where he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Herbert Huncke, the original nexus group that would eventually be come to known as “the Beats.”

The Beat movement came to embody ideals of freedom, sympathy, madness, and ecstasy. The main figures of the movement assumed near mythic status. By implementing an autobiographical technique infused with subjectivity, Beat writers created works in which they were the characters. These efforts synthesized the writers, literature, and lifestyles into one gleaming, bewildering force.

Allen Ginsberg and American Poetry

Harper & Row, Publishers quote Bob Dylan as saying, “Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, con man extraordinaire and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.”