10 of the Best Allen Ginsberg Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) is one of the most important writers associated with the Beat movement of the 1950s. The Beats tended to write in free verse, seeking a more direct and authentic poetic voice than the colder, more objective tone of earlier mid-century poetry. Ginsberg’s poetry, like that of many of the Beats, gives voice to a great sense of disillusionment in the immediate post-war years.

Ginsberg’s fellow American poet William Carlos Williams – from whose imagist technique Ginsberg learnt a fair amount before taking his own poetry in a very different direction – famously said that Ginsberg ‘avoids nothing, but experiences it to the hilt’. Ginsberg himself described his poetry as ‘Angelical Ravings’: there is a holiness to his poetry, a quasi-religious belief in the poet as a conduit for some higher power.

Ginsberg’s poetry, it is pretty much universally agreed, is better heard in performance than read on the page. We have linked to the text of the poems below, but you can find some recordings of Ginsberg reading his poetry online.

1. ‘A Supermarket in California’.

1955 was a good year for Allen Ginsberg. As well as writing ‘Howl’, the long poem for which he is best-known (see below), he also wrote this poem in the same year. But it’s a much shorter and more accessible work than ‘Howl’, so the perfect place to begin discovering Ginsberg’s writing.

And this poem, perhaps more clearly than any other Ginsberg composition, reflects the importance of Walt Whitman to Ginsberg’s own work.

As well as the shared biographical fact that both poets were homosexual, Whitman also paved the way for Ginsberg’s use of form: those long, striding lines of free verse, which Whitman derived from his reading of biblical psalms, are here turned on Whitman himself, who is Ginsberg’s spirit guide as he ponders the price of bananas and the closing time of the American supermarket he traverses …

2. ‘Kaddish’.

Born in New Jersey in 1926, Ginsberg had a poet for a father and a Russian émigré as a mother. This long poem was the title poem from Ginsberg’s 1960 collection, which followed Howl, published four years earlier.

The poem is an elegy for Naomi Ginsberg, the poet’s mother, who died in 1956 in a mental hospital. It’s one of his most touchingly personal poems.

3. ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’.

This 1966 poem is one of Ginsberg’s most famous anti-war poems, and perhaps his best poem in the theme of war. Ginsberg’s travels often inspired his poetry, but this is more directly true of this poem than most: the poem originated from voice recordings Ginsberg made while he was travelling across the Midwest.

The war which earns Ginsberg’s condemnation is, of course, the Vietnam War, which was then a regular topic of news, and demonstrations, across the US. With its description of ‘napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint’, the poem explores the role of the media, and the language used to describe the war, in shaping people’s opinions.

4. ‘Kral Majales’.

After studying at Columbia University, he travelled widely, including – in the mid-1960s – to Czechoslovakia, then on the other side of the Iron Curtain. His exploits in the country would see him expelled and sent back to the United States.

This poem, whose title is Czech for ‘King of the May’, the title which Czech students bestowed upon Ginsberg, reflects this episode in Ginsberg’s life during the 1960s.

5. ‘To Aunt Rose’.

This 1960 poem is another elegy for a beloved female family member: in this case, the poet’s deceased aunt. But the poem also incorporates Ginsberg’s own childhood memories of New Jersey, when his aunt was a part of his life.

He recalls the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War, and how he would sing ‘loyalty songs’ in a ‘squeaky voice’; now, he sees the ghost of his Aunt Rose with her ‘long sad face’.

6. ‘In Back of the Real’.

This is a great ‘entry poem’ for those new to Allen Ginsberg’s work, since it’s a brief lyric, rather than the sprawling, much longer works he is more famous for producing. It dates from 1954, and Ginsberg’s time in California.

In just three short stanzas, he describes sitting in front of tank factory and noticing an ‘ugly’ yellow flower on top of the hay in the road. This flower, he decides, is the ‘flower of the World’: not a pretty, typically ‘romantic’ flower but a flower ‘nonetheless’.

7. ‘America’.

This 1956 poem, also written while Ginsberg was in California, is one of his most overtly political pieces. The poem is by no means a celebration of the United States, instead condemning and satirising both the government and the people. The poem takes in numerous concerns of the Cold War era, accusing the left of betrayal as well as satirising those on the conservative side.

8. ‘The Blue Angel’.

Opening with a description of the film star Marlene Dietrich singing a ‘lament / for mechanical love’, this poem is fine example of ‘film ekphrasis’: describing (moving) pictures in words. It’s another short poem, so a good ‘way in’ to the world of Ginsberg’s poetics.

Indeed, although Ginsberg was writing after the heyday of Futurism – that Italian-born movement of the early twentieth century which celebrated speed and the modern mechanical world – this poem is almost futurist in its descriptions of the famous film star as a ‘toy’ and a ‘machine’.

9. ‘My Sad Self’.

Dedicated to Frank O’Hara, this 1958 poem sees Ginsberg looking down at the people of New York City, surrounded by so many other souls and yet feeling – as the title of the poem suggests – miserable and alone. New York, and by extension the world, have become consumed by consumerism and self-interest, and people have forgotten the true purpose of living.

10. Howl.

A classic poem – indeed, probably the classic poem – of the ‘Beat Generation’, active in the 1950s. The poem, which Ginsberg wrote in August 1955, came to summarise, and epitomise, the mood of post-war America and the feelings of countless members of the young generations growing up in that decade.

The poem is part-diatribe, part satire, part elegy for another ‘lost generation’; it is also a quintessentially ‘Beatnik’ poem in that it rails against the system, the establishment, and conformity, embodied as ‘Moloch’ in the poem. But in part III, which deals with the electric shock treatment undergone by a fellow Beat poet Carl Solomon, the poem anticipates the slightly later confessional poetry of such American poets as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published the poem, was arrested for obscenity, thus further raising the profile of the poem, which is regarded by some critics as the most significant American poem published since T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922. (Ferlinghetti was found not guilty because the poem was protected by the First Amendment.)