Allen Ginsberg's poetry reflects both the era in which he began writing it and the psychedelia that allowed him to accept his own work as an expression of a higher truth. The use of the word "psychedelia" refers not only to psychedelic drugs, such as peyote and marijuana, but to any intentional external attempt to alter the functioning of the mind. Ginsberg's immersion in Zen Buddhism, use of chanting to focus the intellect, and deliberate disregard for standard rhythmic and metrical devices found in most poetry up to that time all contributed as much as his use of substances chemicals to the unique character of his work. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get an original essay The start of Ginsberg's poetic career came early in his career at Columbia University, where, despite his own preference for a career of a literary nature, he followed his father's advice and began a course of study specializing in labor law. However, in December 1943, Ginsberg met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, thus unwittingly creating the trio that would later give rise to the Beat movement in literature and social philosophy. After moving from law to literature, Ginsberg began meeting regularly with Kerouac and Burroughs, and the three together realized a social idea that Kerouac called the "New Vision." It was during 1948 that the writers of the “Beat Generation”, as they called themselves, truly came together. To understand Ginsberg's poetry, it is necessary to understand the circumstances of the time in which he produced most of it. Jack Kerouac coined the term "Beat" to refer to his group of friends and their social and literary ideas in the fall of 1948 during a conversation with novelist John Holmes, who later used the term in the title of a New York Times article: "It's the Beat Generation." The origins of the term "Beat" reflect an individual who is oppressed, tired, world-weary, unable to integrate into "normal" American society, and without any will Holmes himself said it best in his article: The origins of the word "beat" are obscure, but its meaning is all too clear to most Americans. that a simple weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It implies a kind of nudity of the spirit and, ultimately, of the soul; foundation of consciousness In short, it means finding yourself, without drama, pressed against the wall of yourself. A man is beaten every time he goes bankrupt and stakes the sum of his resources on a single number; and the younger generation has been doing this continuously from a young age. The Beat generation grew up and began to mature first during the Great Depression and then during World War II. Finding themselves lost at the end of the war and without an anchor in a changing world, the college-aged students who made up this generation turned to different things to fill this new empty space. Ginsberg, Kerouac and their friends, while perhaps more extremist than many others, only pushed the eclecticisms of their day to their natural conclusions. The second half of the origin of the term "Beat", just as important as the first, was Kerouac's reference to the term "beatific", meaning holy and beautiful; this meaning is clearly applied in much of Ginsberg's work – the third section of "Howl" proclaims thateverything human is equally holy, equally worthy of praise. Of course, the idea that a homeless drug addict on a New York street corner and a morose Catholic priest were equally saints seemed absurd to many who were less devoted to the principles of that generation, but it is this vision of equality and holiness which provided the ideological basis for works such as "Howl", "America" ​​and "Sunflower Sutra". Ginsberg's time at Columbia included not only a change of major, but also a suspension from school, during which he lived with Kerouac, Burroughs, and another friend, Herbert Huncke. All three quickly took up Ginsberg's education, exposing him to authors such as Kafka, Spengler, Blake, Yeats, Céline, Korzybski and Rimbaud. He was readmitted to Colombia a year later, at which time the Household of Literary Friends also began to disperse across the country. He only stayed at Columbia for a semester, before leaving to travel and stay with his friends. It was at this point that Ginsberg began to truly devote himself to poetry, even more than he had during his previous experiments on the subject - most of which had been staged in the style of famous poets of the early 20th century, and none were at all reflective of his personal style. Finding Kerouac distracted and Burroughs involved in harvesting and selling his first crop of Texas marijuana, Ginsberg instead devoted himself to making money in order to be ready for the fall semester at Columbia and continued to write a series of poems which detailed his inner suffering, called "Doldrums", adding "Doldrums in Dakar" at the self-proclaimed pace of one verse per day. He left Galveston for Dakar, where he attempted to procure "restorative love, à la Gide, in the form of a dashing and friendly African", but found himself unable to bridge the linguistic gap and is found in the house of a sorcerer, who has attempted a magical cure for a "painful soul". Ginsberg took the next tanker back to New York and returned to the United States in late summer. He found that the friends he had planned to meet had dispersed again and wrote another “Doldrums.” Ginsberg's last two years at Columbia were mostly uneventful. After he graduated, the school turned down his application for a graduate scholarship and a teaching job and, unable to find the type of work a Columbia graduate was expected to get, he spent his time “washing dishes at Bickford’s and seeing visions.” In the summer of 1948, just before graduating, Ginsberg had a unique vision that convinced him he was meant to be a poet. While reading a copy of Blake's "Ah, Sunflower," he had a vision of Blake reading the poem, hearing aloud a deep, masculine voice which he later compared to hearing the voice of God descending on him. The vision convinced him that he was destined to write poetry, and he spent the rest of his life following that destiny. Shortly after Blake's vision, Ginsberg began a serious attempt to "go straight," submitting to psychoanalysis and ending his minimal life. experimentation with psychotropic substances, which at the time was limited to marijuana and benzedrine, a form of methamphetamine. The "right" period eventually ended and Ginsberg moved to San Francisco in 1953 to join the poetry movement centered there, notably around Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore, City Lights. Once there, Ginsberg busied himself with getting to know local poets and resumed his experiments with psychedelia. The concept of Zen Buddhism, as expounded by itsfollowers in Japan, is somewhat different from the Zen that Ginsberg and his fellow Beatniks experienced. Their version of Zen involved what John Ciardi called “the sanctity of the impromptu”; Merrill elaborates, explaining that "Truth resides within and reason can only corrupt the purity of the first welling of Truth." The apparent discontinuity in Ginsberg's poetry, the absence of punctuation or formal measurement, rests entirely both on this idea of ​​Zen and on his conviction that imposing reason on what his senses perceived was only an attempt to hide the truth. Other Zen concepts are just as easy to understand. found in his work. The second part of the poem “Howl,” ejaculating that all is holy, breathes new life into the contemporary idea that all forms of life are equally sacred. Zen's influence on Ginsberg was not just the product of San Francisco: Ginsberg later spent four years traveling between India, Nepal and Tibet. Much of his later lectures and teachings included analyzes based on Zen ideas about the nature of divinity. The search for an interior divinity which could be translated into an exterior divinity became, like so many other things, a central point of his poetry. The lines of the "Sunflower Sutra" make painfully clear the poetic aspect of this search for the divine: corolla of cloudy thorns sunk and broken like a beaten crown, seeds fallen from its face, mouth of sunny air soon toothless. , the sun's rays erased on its hairy head like a spider's web of dried wire, the leaves stuck out like arms from the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broken pieces of plaster falling from the black twigs, a dead fly in his ear, an ungodly beaten old thing that you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! The relationship displayed between a dying sunflower, beaten and losing its petals and seeds to the wind, and Ginsberg's soul does not imply that Ginsberg found his own soul to be a dying, rotten thing. Rather, the connection made is that the dying sunflower is just as divine as the human soul and therefore deserves just as much love. This Buddhist idea clashed powerfully with contemporary American values, which not only emphasized the superiority of the human soul, but defined the necessities of its purity in stark opposition to Ginsberg's bisexual and experimental lifestyle. In order to focus the mind and intellect -- two very distinct things according to Beat philosophy -- Ginsberg used singing. As understood by many Eastern cultures, the idea of ​​chanting is simple. A mantra, usually a phrase with no specific meaning but which can mean many things on a spiritual level, is repeated over and over with varying tone and emphasis, clearing the mind of all thoughts and allowing tension to be released that might restrict the mind. artistic impulses. The work that Ginsberg produced after such sessions is most easily linked to what is called “free association” writing – writing that can flow from mind to paper without the interference of analyzing thought. what is written. While later revisions on his part prevent much of his poetry from being analyzed according to "free association" standards, the breath-by-breath flow of lines of poetry creates its own natural meter outside of what is normally expected - there aren't many poems reflecting iambic pentameter, but there is a sense of rhythm that puts the words at the center of the poetry. While “Ecologue,” the most dramatic of this type of poetry, was written in 1970, the seeds of the style were planted as early as 1955, when Ginsberg completed the first part of “Howl.” At.