Allen Ginsberg Howl Essay

Most people are familiar with the term "flower power" used by hippies in the 1960's to peacefully protest the Vietnam War. What many don't know is that influential poet Allen Ginsberg fabricated this phrase (“Irwin Allen Ginsberg”). In many ways, such as this, Allen Ginsberg is a forgotten hero. The specifics of what Ginsberg accomplished in his life and nonconformist political poetry are overlooked, but the legacy he left behind will last forever. Allen Ginsberg is best known for his riveting long prom "Howl". Because of his experiences in college and his involvement in the Beat Movement, Allen Ginsberg’s influential poem “Howl” shows how America has become unoriginal and robotic because of the government’s corrupted thoughts. Irwin Allen
“Ginsberg’s early life was marked by his mother’s psychological troubles, including a series of nervous breakdowns” (“Allen Ginsberg”). During high school, Ginsberg was introduced to who became one of his greatest inspirations in life, Walt Whitman. Ginsberg took to the style of Whitman’s writing, along with the political views his poems displayed and his work was tied to Whitman’s throughout his years as a poet. When he graduated high school, Ginsberg moved to New York to attend Columbia University. During his time at the university, he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs who, with the help of Ginsberg, developed a “revolutionary cultural movement” (“Irwin Allen Ginsberg”). After graduating from the university in 1948, Ginsberg was involved in a robbery in 1949. To avoid time in prison, he pleaded insanity and spent time in Columbia’s mental health ward. After his treatment was over, he became a student to William Carlos Williams, who became another inspiration of Ginsberg. It was not until 1955 that Ginsberg’s writing career took off. It was then that he wrote his most famous piece, “Howl”, and was thrust into the spotlight as the “icon of anti-censorship” (“Irwin Allen Ginsberg”). Throughout Ginsberg’s
Before he wrote Howl, Ginsberg grew up in an unstable home and went to college at Columbia University. While at Columbia, he became the leader of a revolution known as the Beat Movement. In the midst of this radical change, he wrote his most prominent poem “Howl”. Ginsberg’s use of literary devices like allusions, imagery, diction, and detail show how America’s unprincipled government has turned their country into a conformist asylum of sorts. The way Allen Ginsberg’s poetry made American’s consider who they are and what their great nation has come to will be valued forever. In the words of his former mentor, William Carlos Williams: “Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt” (“On