Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a schoolteacher and a poet, and his mother Naomi Ginsberg, was a Russian immigrant. He attended Columbia University where he met two important writers of the period, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and William S. Burroughs (1914-1997). Burroughs, the author of the original and influential The Naked Lunch (1959), introduced Ginsberg to modem writers such as Kafka, Yeats, Rimbaud and С line.
Ginsberg graduated from Columbia in 1948 and did various odd jobs before finally moving to San Francisco in the early 1950s. It was here that he met other of the most important new poets of that time including Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Feringhetti's now legendary bookstore City Lights published Ginsberg's most famous book of poems Howl in 1956. In long rambling lines that bring to mind both Whitman and Blake, he tells of the adventurous and often tragic lives of his friends and fellow artists. Its opening lines: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...' are some of the most famous words in American poetry. Howl, together with Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957), became the bibles of a generation of young rebels known as the 'Beat' generation—beat was a term coined by Kerouac and conveyed two ideas: 'beaten' and 'beatified'. These were the young people who rebelled against the complacent consumer society of post-war America. The fifties in America was a period of great economic wellbeing for many, the emergence of television and the Cold War, which also led to the persecution or ostracism of those outside the mainstream of American consumer society.
The Beat poets took their inspiration from Walt Whitman, especially in his poems that celebrate the diversity of America and the holiness of each individual and of the body. Jazz, too, gave them important lessons 011 artistic improvisation, especially, the creators of bebop, including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk Ginsberg, and other beat writers, also learned much from Zen Buddhism, which was just becoming well-known in America through the essays of D.T. Suzuki. After the success of Howl Ginsberg became widely known and travelled widely throughout the United States, and the world, giving readings of his poems. His next important book of poetry is Kaddish published in 1961, which was a kind of mourning prayer for his mother. (In Judaism 'Kaddish' is a prayer in Aramaic that glorifies God and calls for the coming of his kingdom on earth; one Kaddish prayer is the traditional prayer recited at a funeral). Some of his other important poems include Reality Sandwiches (1963); Planet News, (1968); Collected Poems 1947-1980 (1984); White Shroud: Poems 1980- 1985л987); and Selected Poems 1947-1995 (1996).
Sylvia Plath (1933 - 1963;
Born to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath published her first poem when she was eight. Sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward perfection in everything she attempted, she was, on the surface, a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A's, winning the best prizes. By the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred poems.
Plath's surface perfection was however underlain by grave personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had their origin in the death of her father (he was a college professor and an expert on bees) when she was eight. During the summer following her junior year at Smith, having returned from a stay in New York City where she had been a student "guest editor" at Mademoiselle Magazine, Plath nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping pills. She later described this experience in an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963 (1966). After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy Plath resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success, graduating from Smith with honors and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.
In 1956 she married the English poet Ted Hughes, and in 1960, when she was 28, her first book. The Colossus, was published in England. The poems in this book - formally precise, well wrought - show clearly the dedication with which Plath had served her apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses of what was to come in the poems she would begin writing early in 1961. She and Hughes settled for a while in an English country village in Devon, but less than two years after the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart.
The winter of 1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, found Plath living in a small London flat, now with two children, ill with flu and low on money. The hardness of her life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between four and eight in the morning, before the children woke, sometimes finishing a poem a day. In these last poems it is as if some deeper, powerful self has grabbed control; death is given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain becomes almost tactile.
On February 11, 1963, Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30. Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published; this was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and, in 1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted Hughes. "Poppies in July" was written in July of 1962.