Selected Poems

Chosen by ginsberg himself from nearly fifty years of experimental, groundbreaking verse, this selection, in his words, summarizes what i deem most honest, most penetrant of my writing, and includes lesser known and later works which go beyond his iconic beat generation image presented chronologically, and ranging from early works such as paterson (1949) to selections from white shroud (1980-85) and cosmopolitan greetings (1986-92), and including the classic poems howl (1955-56) and kaddish (1959-60) as well as songs, recent uncollected poems and notes by the author, this volume brings together the most intensely personal verse of a great american poet - incandescent explorations that expand the consciousness with their breadth of vision and depth of humanity

Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, a son of Naomi Ginsberg and lyric poet Louis Ginsberg. In 1956 he published his signal poem, Howl, one of the most widely read and translated poems of the century. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French minister of culture in 1993, and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world, Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997.