Allen Ginsberg – 1926-1997

Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of noted poet Louis Ginsberg. Influenced less by his father than by the likes of William Carlos Williams—an exponent of free verse and narrative poetry in a lyric vernacular—and Walt Whitman, Ginsberg created a new form of free verse, wild, ecstatic, angry, and richly inventive, in his modern autobiographical epic Howl of 1956, which is considered one of the central poems of the so-called Beat movement in American literature.