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Essay on Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg is probably one of the best known contemporary poets in recent history. He was born in 1926 in Newark, NJ and received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1948.
Like many other artists, Ginsberg held a variety of odd jobs before becoming an established writer. His employment history includes work on various cargo ships, a spot welder, a dishwasher and he also worked as a night porter in Denver. He has participated in numerous poetry readings, including the famous Six Gallery event that occurred in San Francisco.
Ginsberg was the recipient of numerous honors and awards during his lifetime including: the Woodbury Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Award for Poetry, NEA grants and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
"HOWL", caused an incredible amount of controversy; however, it also forever changed the world of poetry. Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926 to an upstanding middle class Jewish family. In a lifetime of literary accomplishment, he has moved from the position of a curiosity on the borders of society to become the hero of a broad-based subculture.
In 1943, Ginsberg entered Columbia University where he met Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, two names that would later join him as fathers of a literary/social movement known as the Beat Generation. Ginsberg's subject matter focused on the activities of his social circle and included such things as drug use and homosexual sex. These topics hadn't been written about so openly, without some sort of literary masking before. Ginsberg's far-ranging, wildly expressive style greatly impacted the evolution of modern literature.
His literary odyssey created a vast legacy of poetry and the publication of many books of poetry and prose. Perhaps most notable, "Howl," was published in 1956 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.................
