Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsbergwas an American poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and was known as embodying various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions. He was one of many influential American writers of his time known as the Beat Generation, which included famous writers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth3 June 1926
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
You are what you think about all day.
Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.
Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.
Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.
Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone.
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
Candor disarms paranoia.
I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.