Allen’s early poetry was written in formal rhyme like his father and his idol William Blake. Formal rhyming is maintained in each stanza excepting the first. Death is personified as a new person who has grown out of death and the poet is telling each one of them, their significance in his life. And, when he lost his father, he created this poem. Due to his mother’s illness he was highly disturbed and after her death he wrote ‘Kaddish’. His mother Naomi Livergant Ginsberg was mentally upset. His father Louis Ginsberg was a high school teacher and a published poet. It’s a poem dealing with blues after the death of loved ones. Ginsberg wrote this poem during his flight to home to attend his father’s funeral. Since then he sang and played his poems on it. He was introduced to harmonium in Banaras by Buddhist Nagarjun. In mid-sixties he came across Buddhism and krishnaism during his visit to India. He laid his hands on most of the taboos of the 1950s- drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, gay rights, drug use, communism, Bangladesh liberation war, Vietnam War protest and many others. He is remembered for his controversial poem ‘Howl’, reflecting his own homosexuality in the times when being homosexual was a crime in the U.S. Allen Ginsberg was the famous American poet of beat movement OF 1950s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |