American poet, the most publicly visible figure of the Beat generation and one of the central American poets of the second half of the twentieth century; author of Howl (1956), among the most widely read American poems of the postwar period, and the principal poetic voice of the American counterculture from the late 1950s through the 1970s.
Ginsberg was born in Newark to Louis Ginsberg, a lyric poet and high-school teacher, and Naomi Levy Ginsberg, a Russian-Jewish immigrant and Communist whose long psychiatric hospitalization is the subject of his 1961 elegy Kaddish. He enrolled at Columbia in 1943 intending to become a labor lawyer, fell in with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in Morningside Heights, and turned to poetry under the direct mentorship of William Carlos Williams, a fellow Paterson, NJ native who read his early work and directed him toward a flexible, breath-paced American line rather than the formal modernism then dominant. The decisive moment is the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco — organized by Kenneth Rexroth, with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure — at which Ginsberg read the newly written first part of Howl. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in the audience, telegrammed him the next day offering to publish it through his City Lights bookstore; the 1957 obscenity trial of Howl and Other Poems, which Ferlinghetti won, made Ginsberg nationally famous.
Howl — "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" — combines the long Whitmanian line, the Hebrew liturgical cadence of his father's tradition, the Blakean prophetic stance, and a direct catalog of drug use, homosexuality, and psychiatric institutionalization that was at the time legally prosecutable. Kaddish (1961) is the longer and more personally difficult companion, an elegy for his mother that remains the major American poem on mental illness and family. The later work is uneven but includes Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966), one of the important poems of the Vietnam War; The Fall of America (1972), which won the National Book Award; and White Shroud (1986).
Ginsberg's life after Howl was a long public performance of the poet as cultural activist. He was an early and articulate advocate for gay liberation, a Buddhist practitioner who from 1972 onward studied with Chögyam Trungpa and co-founded with Anne Waldman the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, a presence at every significant counter-cultural moment from the 1965 Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee teach-ins through the 1968 Chicago convention to the 1994 meeting with Václav Havel at the Prague Castle. His collaborations with musicians — with Dylan on the 1975 Rolling Thunder tour, with The Clash, with Philip Glass — reflect the Beat ambition to return poetry to oral performance. He taught at Brooklyn College from 1986 until his death in 1997.