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
I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs -- when I was 17 -- that I realized I was talking through an empty skull, ... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.
Our heads are round so thought can change direction
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.
Candor disarms paranoia.
Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?
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.
Subject is known by what she sees.
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
What is obscenity? And to whom?
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
Inside skull vast as outside skull