Allen Ginsberg: Collected Poems 1947-1997

The only volume of collected poems to cover the entire 50-year career of the poet "responsible for loosening the breath of American poetry at mid-century."

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As the chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg-along with Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank OHara and others working in the Bay Area and New York during the 1950s-changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse. Before long, Ginsbergs classic work, "Howl," Reality Sandwiches, "Kaddish," Planet News, and The Fall of America, would become central in leading American (and international) poetry toward uncensored vernacular, raw candor, the ecstatic, the rhapsodic, and the sincere-all leavened, in his poetry, by an attractive and pervasive streak of common sense.One of Americas great poets, Ginsberg, with his insistence on spiritual liberation, also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech, but also our view of the world.