Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat
poet born in Newark, New Jersey. Ginsberg is best known for
Howl (1956), a long poem about
consumer society's negative human values and the
self-destruction of his friends among the
beat generation. Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by modernism, romanticism, the beat and cadence of
jazz, early English prose-poetry, his Kagyu
Buddhist practice and his
Jewish background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed from the English poet and artist William Blake on …
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