Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), full name Irwin Allen Ginsberg, was a US poet and writer. He, in the 1940s, along with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, formed the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.

Wisdom & Quotes

• I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

- Howl

• The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

- quoted in Helen Weaver's review of Ginsberg's Collected Poems, in The Litchfield County Times, May 31, 1985

Newton Norman Minow