Biography Essay

Allen Ginsberg's reputation as a major poet is now secure; he has outlived the other major poets of mid century with whom he is frequently compared, such as Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara, who with Ginsberg make up a core of writers that revolutionized the writing of American verse in the 1950s. Their collective achievement was to make for poetry the final break with European and English standards of versification that sent American poetry in pursuit of its own rhythms and forms, a direction it continues to explore with verve and astonishing variety. Each of these major writers gave to the main currents of verse his own unique voice and intelligence, but it was Ginsberg especially who seems to have awakened America's youth to the powers of poetry to make stirring prophecies and to reinvigorate the spheres of politics and ideology. Perhaps more than...