Allen Ginsberg
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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
How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.
From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'
Things are symbols of themselves.
Others can measure their visions by what we see.
Subject is known by what she sees.
I know too much and not enough
This is the one and only firmament; therefore it is the absolute world. There is no other world. The circle is complete. I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways of Heaven.
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination
I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows --/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.
Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?
Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!