Allen Ginsberg's Selected Poetry

The book I reviewed was the selected poems of Allen Ginsberg, a powerful poet who wrote during the first half of the twentieth century. He is well known for his pugnacious poetry against America, the government, and other strong political movements not just during his own time, but also throughout history. One of the poems that I focused on was Howl, which to me set a strong image of the author’s environment. It’s broken up in three parts in which each part bellows a message to society about how the environment around them can be corrupted. His language tells different stories about people in his life that he felt have been corrupted, like Carl Solomon for example. Ginsberg writes in part three of Howl about one person’s life is taken away and set in elsewhere in a place called Rockland, an insane asylum in New York. Ginsberg grieves with him, recognizing that he didn’t do anything wrong, it was the environment around him. The author mostly writes in the narrative form. Telling stories about characters that relate to him, mostly about Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac (other fellow beat writers). Ginsberg was one of these few that created the beat generation, a time when you could say anything and get away with it. Some may shun his work others may love it. His structure of poetry can vary from piece to piece but his ideas are still the same. He strives for freedom in any shape or form. It’s rare to find a rhyme scheme in his works but it seems like his writing doesn’t need a rhyme scheme. When you read the poems aloud you can feel pain, anguish, anger, tension, and other hardcore feelings that make you want to fight against the opposing force. Another poem I found interesting was America, which rips into every sort of wrong doing that Ginsberg believes should be recognized. Even now in our demographic we can see things that way that he does, and as an active poet of this society, his poems make me want to write something against I hate. It makes me want to question my history and what other people have done wrong in that situation, such as Bush, Elizabeth Smart, global warming, even the drinking age in our community. How would you feel if the drinking age was lowered in order to keep kids away from strong binge drinking and becoming so ill they need to be transported to the hospital? What would it do for us? Don’t we in our time, like Ginsberg in his, enjoy breaking a few rules every once in a while? I feel as though the Beat Generation is the reason why people not only want to write want that want, but feel it necessary to send that message, because if no one else does, what is there to argue with?