Allen Ginsberg's poetry reflects both the time in which he began writing it and the psychedelia that allowed him to accept his 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 made to alter the functioning of the mind. Ginsberg's depth in Zen Buddhism, use of chanting to focus the intellect, and deliberate disregard for the standard rhythmic and metrical devices found in most poetry up to that point contributed as much as his use of chemicals to the uniqueness of his work. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The beginning of Ginsberg's poetic career occurred early in his career at Columbia University, where, despite his preference for a career of a literary nature, he followed his father's advice and began a curriculum of study in a major as labor law expert. In December 1943, however, Ginsberg met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, unintentionally creating the trio that would later give birth to the Beat movement in literature and social philosophy. After switching his major from law to literature, Ginsberg began meeting regularly with Kerouac and Burroughs, and the three of them together crafted a social idea that Kerouac called the "New Vision." It was during the year 1948 that the "Beat generation writers", 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" for 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 heading of an article for the New York Times, "This is the Beat Generation." The origins of the term "Beat" reflect a downtrodden, jaded, world-weary individual, unable to fit into "normal" American society and without any particular desire to expend enormous effort to do so. Holmes himself said it best in his article: The origins of the word "beat" are obscure, but the meaning is all too clear to most Americans. More than simple tiredness it involves the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It implies a sort of nakedness of the mind and, ultimately, of the soul; the feeling of being reduced to the foundation of consciousness. In short, it means being pushed undramatically against the wall of yourself. A man is beaten whenever he goes all out and bets the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done so continuously since their early youth. 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 unmoored in a world that was undergoing drastic changes, the college-aged people who made up this generation turned to different things to fill that new empty space. Ginsberg, Kerouac and their friends, though perhaps more extreme than many others, did nothing but carry the eclecticism of their era to its natural conclusions. The second half of the origin of the term "Beat", 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 that all that is human is equally holy, equally worthy of praise. Naturally,the idea that a drug-addicted homeless man on a New York street corner and a sullen Catholic priest were equally saintly struck as absurd many of those least devoted to the principles of the generation, but it was this vision of equality and holiness that provided the ideological basis for such works as "Howl", "America" ​​and "Sunflower Sutra". Columbia involved not only a change of major, but also a suspension from school, during which he lived with Kerouac, Burroughs and another friend, Herbert Huncke. The three promptly resumed Ginsberg's education, exposing him to authors such as Kafka, Spengler, Blake, Yeats, Celine, Korzybski, and Rimbaud. He was readmitted to Columbia a year later, at which point the family of literary friends also began to disperse, scattering across the country. He remained at Columbia for only one semester, before leaving to travel and be with his friends. It was at this point that Ginsberg began to truly devote himself to poetry, more than he had with his previous experiments on the subject, most of which had been set in the style of the highly renowned 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 turned to making money to be ready for the fall semester at Columbia and went on to write a series of poems detailing his suffering. inner, called "Doldrums", adding "Dakar Doldrums" to the self-appointed rhythm of one verse per day. She set out from Galveston for Dakar, where she attempted to secure "a refreshing, Gide-like love in the form of a charming, sympathetic African," but found herself unable to bridge the linguistic gap and instead ended up in the home of a sorcerer, who attempted a magical cure for an "aching soul". Ginsberg took the next tanker back to New York and returned to the United States at the end of the summer. He found that the friends he had planned to meet up with had dispersed again, and he wrote another "Doldrums". Ginsberg's last two years at Columbia were mostly uneventful. After graduation, the school rejected his application for a scholarship and a teaching job, and, unable to find the kind of job a Columbia graduate should get, he spent his time "washing dishes at Bickford's and having visions". In the summer of 1948, shortly before his graduation, Ginsberg had a single vision that convinced him that he should become a poet. While reading a copy of Blake's "Ah, Sunflower," he had a vision of Blake reading the poem, hearing aloud a deep, male voice that he later likened to hearing the voice of God descend upon 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", undergoing psychoanalysis and putting an end to his minimal work. experimentation with mind-altering substances, which at that time were limited to marijuana and benzedrine, a form of methamphetamine. The "straight" period eventually ended, and Ginsberg moved to San Francisco in 1953 to join the poetry movement centered there, particularly around Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore, City Lights. Once there, Ginsberg busied himself with local poets and resumed his experimentation with psychedelia. The concept of Zen Buddhism, as expounded by its followers in Japan, is somewhat different from the Zen with which Ginsberg and his fellow Beatniks experimented. Their version of Zen featured what John Ciardi called "the sanctity of the improvised"; Merrill expands, explaining that “Truth lies within, and reason alone cancorrupt the purity of the first gush of Truth." The apparent discontinuity in Ginsberg's poetry, the lack of punctuation or formal meter, is based entirely on both this idea of ​​Zen and his belief that imposing reason on what his senses perceived it was simply an attempt to disguise the truth. Other Zen concepts are equally easily found in his work. The second part of the poem "Howl", exclaiming that all is holy, gives contemporary life to the idea that all life is equally. sacred. Zen's influence on Ginsberg was not just a product of San Francisco: Ginsberg later spent four years traveling between India, Nepal, and Tibet. Much of his subsequent lectures and teachings included analyzes based on Zen ideas of the nature of divinity The search for internal divinity that could be translated into external divinity became, like many other things, the fulcrum of his poetry. The verses of the "Sunflower Sutra" make the poetic aspect of this search for the divine painfully clear: corolla of ears. cloudy pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen from the face, mouth of sunny air soon to be toothless. , sunbeams erased on his hairy head like a web of dry thread, leaves protruding like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broken pieces of plaster fallen from the black twigs, a dead fly in his ear, wicked old thing and battered you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! The relationship shown between a dying sunflower, battered and shedding petals and seeds in 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 worth just as much love. This Buddhist idea clashed strongly with contemporary American values, which not only emphasized the superiority of the human soul, but defined the necessities of its purity in complete opposition to Ginsberg's bisexual and experimental lifestyle. things according to Beat philosophy: Ginsberg used singing. As understood by many Eastern cultures, the idea of ​​singing 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 the release of tensions that might limit artistic impulses. The work Ginsberg produced after such sessions is most easily related to what is called "free association" writing - writing that is allowed to flow from mind to paper without the interference of thought analyzing what is written. While later revisions on his part prevent much of his poetry from being analyzed by "free association" standards, the breath-by-breath flow of the verse creates its own natural meter outside of what is normally expected - there there are many poems that reflect iambic pentameter, but there is a sense of rhythm that puts the words into poetic focus. While “Ecologue,” the most dramatic of this type of poem, was written in 1970, the seeds for the style were planted as early as 1955, when Ginsberg completed the first part of “Howl.” which produced major changes in Ginsberg's poetry: his collection Kaddish and Other Poems, a reflection on his mother's madness through her experiences with ayahuasca in South America, was published; and Timothy Leary asked Ginsberg to participate in a series of studies involving psilocybin mushrooms and LSD. Ginsberg's sojourn in South America and experiences with ayahuasca, which translates to "lives of the dead," gave rise to vivid images in his poetry based.