Allen Ginsberg





Allen Ginsberg

Author profile


born
June 03, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, The United States

died
April 05, 1997

gender
male

website

genre


About this author

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was the son of Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, two Jewish members of the New York literary counter-culture of the 1920s. Ginsberg was raised among several progressive political perspectives. A supporter of the Communist party, Ginsberg's mother was a nudist whose mental health was a concern throughout the poet's childhood. According to biographer Barry Miles, "Naomi's illness gave Allen an enormous empathy and tolerance for madness, neurosis, and psychosis."

As an adolescent, Ginsberg savored Walt Whitman, though in 1939, when Ginsberg graduated high school, he considered Edgar Allan Poe his favorite poet. Eager to follow a childhood hero who had received a scholarship to Columbia University, Ginsberg made a vow that if he got...more


Average rating: 4.04 · 41,554 ratings · 1,393 reviews · 153 distinct works
Howl and Other Poems
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4.18 of 5 stars 4.18 avg rating — 17,386 ratings — published 1956 — 12 editions
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Kaddish and Other Poems
4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 avg rating — 2,068 ratings — published 1961 — 3 editions
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Collected Poems, 1947-1980
4.16 of 5 stars 4.16 avg rating — 1,900 ratings — published 1984 — 6 editions
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Howl: Original Draft Facsimile
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4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 avg rating — 1,039 ratings — published 1956 — 9 editions
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Collected Poems, 1947-1997
4.38 of 5 stars 4.38 avg rating — 664 ratings — published 1984 — 6 editions
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Reality Sandwiches
4.02 of 5 stars 4.02 avg rating — 532 ratings — published 1963 — 3 editions
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The Fall of America
4.03 of 5 stars 4.03 avg rating — 401 ratings — published 1972 — 3 editions
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Selected Poems, 1947-1995
4.13 of 5 stars 4.13 avg rating — 286 ratings — published 1996 — 6 editions
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Death and Fame: Last Poems,...
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 209 ratings4 editions
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Planet News
4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 avg rating — 185 ratings — published 1968 — 2 editions
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More books by Allen Ginsberg…
“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
Allen Ginsberg

“The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight,the weight we carry is love. ”
Allen Ginsberg

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”
Allen Ginsberg

Polls

Who is your favorite poet? (add to this list if needed)

 
  40 votes, 14.5%

 
  23 votes, 8.4%

Edgar Allan Poe (write-in)
 
  21 votes, 7.6%

Emily Dickinson
 
  16 votes, 5.8%

Robert Frost (write-in)
 
  15 votes, 5.5%

Sylvia Plath (write-in)
 
  14 votes, 5.1%

Pablo Neruda (write-in)
 
  11 votes, 4.0%

 
  8 votes, 2.9%

 
  7 votes, 2.5%

Walt Whitman (write-in)
 
  7 votes, 2.5%

 
  7 votes, 2.5%

william shakespear (write-in)
 
  6 votes, 2.2%

Rumi (write-in)
 
  6 votes, 2.2%

Rainer Maria Rilke (write-in)
 
  5 votes, 1.8%

T.S. Elliot (write-in)
 
  5 votes, 1.8%

William Blake (write-in)
 
  4 votes, 1.5%

Fernando Pessoa (write-in)
 
  4 votes, 1.5%

Dante (write-in)
 
  4 votes, 1.5%

Lord Alfred Tennyson (write-in)
 
  4 votes, 1.5%

D. H. Lawrence (write-in)
 
  4 votes, 1.5%

Dorothy Parker (write-in)
 
  4 votes, 1.5%

John Keats (write-in)
 
  3 votes, 1.1%

Federico García Lorca (write-in)
 
  3 votes, 1.1%

Charles Baudelaire (write-in)
 
  3 votes, 1.1%

anne sexton (write-in)
 
  3 votes, 1.1%

 
  3 votes, 1.1%

Seamus Heaney (write-in)
 
  2 votes, 0.7%

 
  2 votes, 0.7%

Hart Crane (write-in)
 
  2 votes, 0.7%

Dylan Thomas (write-in)
 
  2 votes, 0.7%

Andrea Gibson (write-in)
 
  2 votes, 0.7%

John Donne (write-in)
 
  2 votes, 0.7%

Wallace Stevens (write-in)
 
  2 votes, 0.7%

 
  2 votes, 0.7%

 
  2 votes, 0.7%

Ted Hughes (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Stephen Crane (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Jack Kerouac (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Ellen Hopkins (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Lewis Carroll (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Geoffrey Chaucer (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Al Berto (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Dmitry Prigov (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Wisława Szymborska (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Mark Doty (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Mario Benedetti (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Percy Shelley (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Arthur Rimbaud (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Suheir Hammad (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

E.E. Cummings (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Hiroyuki Nishigaki (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Gwendolyn Brooks (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Philip Levine (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Rafał Wojaczek (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Gérard de Nerval (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

A. Kamalei (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

 
  1 vote, 0.4%

cesar vallejo (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

Alexander Pope (write-in)
 
  1 vote, 0.4%

 
  0 votes, 0.0%

 
  0 votes, 0.0%

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