Heart Attack Kills Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg Revolutionary Writer Dies Days After Cancer Diagnosis

Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Generation poet and counterculture guru whose outsized personality, daring verse and scalding political critiques ranged over five decades and profoundly influenced American life and literature, died Saturday at age 70, just days after being diagnosed with liver cancer.

Ginsberg, whose angry, anti-establishment, sexually explicit 1956 poem “Howl” was considered a revolutionary event in American poetry, was surrounded by a group of “close friends and old lovers” in his New York apartment when he died.

“He went the way he wanted to go,” said poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose arrest in 1957 for publishing “Howl” led to a landmark obscenity case. “No life support systems. He just had a Buddhist vigil all night long.”

Poet and critic J.D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review, said Ginsberg was “as much a social force as a literary phenomenon. Like (Walt) Whitman, he was a bard in the old manner - outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant.”

Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and charter member of the poetic rebels who challenged American literary and political conformity in the 1950s, said Ginsberg’s “willingness to put himself out there as a poet, a performer and a speaker brought poetry into a cultural and political relevance that it had never known before.”

Because of Ginsberg, Snyder said, “poetry became the way the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement and now the ecology movement speaks to itself and to the outside world.”

Asked once to describe his political and social views, Ginsberg said simply: “Absolute defiance.”

Ginsberg’s poetry influenced the music of Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono and Patti Smith, the poetry of Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, and the in-your-face political antics of Abbie Hoffman and other radicals. Ginsberg invented the term “flower power” in the 1960s, and, as testament to durability, was a favorite on MTV in the 1990s.

Gordon Ball, Ginsberg’s editor and friend for 30 years, called Ginsberg “the greatest influence on the American poetic voice since Whitman,” an evaluation few would challenge, although some would suggest the influence was not always positive.

Ginsberg’s voluminous poems tore relentlessly at American materialism, imperialism and hypocrisy, exalted the joys of homosexuality and drug use, promoted socialism as the ideal form of government, and gave anguished voice to his own inner torment and insecurity.

The descent of his mother, Naomi, into madness and death in 1956 led to what many critics believe to be Ginsberg’s finest work, “Kaddish,” with its image of his mother during her frequent stays in mental institutions: “Back! You! Naomi! Skull on you! Gaunt immortality and revolution come - small broken woman - the ashen indoor eyes of hospitals, ward grayness on skin.”

Like Whitman, whom he idolized, Ginsberg was contradictory, expansive, exuberant, audacious, generous, self-absorbed and gifted and cursed with a sense of mission, of using poetry to mold the American experiment in self-expression and self-governance.

He was a political radical, leading protests against American involvement in the Vietnam War and CIA activities in the Third World, and yet was thrown out of Communist Cuba and Czechoslovakia for advocating personal freedom.

He grew up in a Jewish household but converted to Buddhism and helped found a Buddhist university in Boulder, Colo. He had a middle-class upbringing in New Jersey but was drawn to the drug addicts, petty criminals, pimps and “Negro hipsters” of post-World War II New York.

Ginsberg had called several friends last week to say that while he was sick he was still optimistic. The quickness of his passing left many of them stunned.

“It’s all very sad and awful,” said Snyder from his cabin in Northern California. “Just a few days ago he was sunny and so happy to have found a new (apartment).”

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 8, 1926, in Newark, N.J. His father, Louis, was a high school English teacher and well-regarded poet of conservative bent who died in 1976. His mother was a Russian-born Marxist. The pair were devoted parents, and Louis taught his sons (Ginsberg had an older brother, Eugene, who became a lawyer) to recite Dickinson, Poe, Shelley, Keats and Milton.

Ginsberg enrolled at Columbia University in 1943 and soon came under the spell of a group of rebellious, adventuresome writers who together would form the core of the Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes, and the bisexual, rugged handsome football star who provided the group with energy and charisma, Neal Cassidy.

He quit Columbia, joined the Merchant Marine and claimed to have had a mystical vision while masturbating in East Harlem in which he heard an angelic voice reciting William Blake’s “Songs of Experience.” He was hospitalized briefly in a psychiatric ward and later went to the San Francisco Bay Area to join Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Phillip Whalen and others of the “West Coast beats.”

Together, they shocked and outraged the literary world with their scatology and obscenity and seeming disregard for meter and rhyme. The poet-critic William Carlos Williams, in one of the more important early appraisals of “Howl,” likened it to a modern Dante-esque journey.

Ginsberg won the 1973 National Book Award for “The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971” and was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his “Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986 to 1992.” He sold his papers and memorabilia to Stanford University.

He dropped acid with Timothy Leary and toured with Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue. As a leading exponent of the theory that all poetry should be spoken, his readings were standing room only. He recited a poem from the pitcher’s mound before a baseball game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ‘AMERICA’ America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I’m sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.