Practicing Buddhist.

Leading Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. Opposed militarism, capitalism, conformity, economic materialism and sexual repression, bureaucracy. Openness to Eastern religions. Tireless persistence in protesting against "imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless."

Studying Williams' style led to a tremendous shift from the early formalist work to a loose, colloquial free verse style.

Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by Modernism (most importantly the American style of Modernism pioneered by William Carlos Williams), Romanticism (specifically William Blake and John Keats), the beat and cadence of jazz (specifically that of bop musicians such as Charlie Parker), and his Kagyu Buddhist practice and Jewish background.

Allen Ginsberg , born in Newark, N.J., is an American poet and leading apostle of the beat generation.   His first published work, `Howl and Other Poems` (1956), sparked the San Francisco Renaissance and defined the generation of the `50s with an authority and vision that had not occurred in the United States since T. S. Eliot captured the anxiety of the 1920s in The Waste Land. Ginsberg`s bardic rage against material values, however, was in a voice very different from Eliot`s scholarly mourning for the loss of the spirit. In his second major work, `\Kaddish\` (1961), a poem on the anniversary of his mother`s death, Ginsberg described their anguished relationship. 

In the 1960s, while vigorously participating in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he published several poetic works, including `\Reality Sandwiches\` (1963) and `\Planet News\` (1969). 

`\The Fall of America\` received the National Book Award for 1974. `\Collected Poems\`, 1947-85 (1995) contains all of his important work; `\White Shroud\` (1987) includes poems from the 1980s. 

Ginsberg sees himself as a part of the prophetic tradition in poetry begun by William Blake and continued by Walt Whitman. He names his contemporary influences as William Carlos Williams and his friend Jack Kerouac.

Passed away in 1997.