Allen_Ginsberg_-_Howl

Allen Ginsberg - Howl Allen Ginsberg is a very popular and well-known contemporary poet today. He was born in 1926 in Newark, NJ and received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1948 and 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. Ginsberg had a desire to attain the mystical and as he would say, “the metaphysical poets of the nineteenth century were perhaps his greatest influence.” It was the desire to expand the mind and reach the spiritual that inspired Ginsberg to experiment with substances such as marijuana and Benzedrine. He claimed that he was under the influence of drugs while writing the poem “Howl”. The poem “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg is a poem that evokes emotion and social awareness of the ‘illness’ and ‘madness’ of the people and the American society. Ginsberg’s poem is divided into three parts, and each part of the poem elicits a different kind of emotion and focus; the three parts wherein the poem is divided also addresses and talks about a different kind of audience, while consistently extending the message ginsberg, part, poem, society, social, two, three, one, moloch, howl, writing, solomon, rockland, parts, movement, kind, begins, american, madness, while, tormented, time, suicide, strife, repeated, political, poetry, persecutor, natural, minds, line, lifetime, intensity, influence, imagination