Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Generation poet and counterculture guru whose outsized personality, daring verse and scalding political critiques ranged over five decades and profoundly influenced American life and literature, died Saturday at age 70, just days after being diagnosed with liver cancer.
Ginsberg, whose angry, anti-establishment and sexually explicit poem "Howl," published in 1956, was considered a revolutionary event in American poetry, was surrounded by a group of "close friends and old lovers" in his New York apartment when he died.
"He went the way he wanted to go," said poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was tried on obscenity charges in 1957 for publishing "Howl." "No life-support systems. He just had a Buddhist vigil all night long."
Poet and critic J.D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review, said Ginsberg was "as much a social force as a literary phenomenon. Like [Walt] Whitman, he was a bard in the old manner--outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant."
Ginsberg, McClatchy said, "unzipped the polite literary fashions of the 1950s and offered a voice for the tumultuous, disaffected decades that followed. His work is a history of our era's psyche, with all its contradictory urges."
Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and charter member of the poetic rebels who challenged American literary and political conformity in the 1950s, said Ginsberg's "willingness to put himself out there as a poet, a performer and a speaker brought poetry into a cultural and political relevance that it had never known before."
Because of Ginsberg, Snyder said, "Poetry became the way the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement and now the ecology movement speaks to itself and to the outside world."
Asked once to describe his political and social views, Ginsberg said simply: "Absolute defiance."
Ginsberg's poetry influenced the music of Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono and Patti Smith, the poetry of Czech President Vaclav Havel, and the in-your-face political antics of Abbie Hoffman and other radicals. Ginsberg invented the term "flower power" in the 1960s, and, as testament to durability, was a favorite on MTV in the 1990s.
"Dylan said he was the greatest influence on the American poetic voice since Whitman," said Gordon Ball, Ginsberg's editor and friend for 30 years. "I think that's certainly true."
That's an evaluation few would challenge, although some would suggest that the influence was not always positive.
