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Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer who lived from 1926 to 1997 and became one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century. His work helped shape modern American poetry and culture, though the specific details of his impact and legacy would require additional historical context to fully explain.
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Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet born in Newark, New Jersey. Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about consumer society's negative human values and the self-destruction of his friends among the beat generation. Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by modernism, romanticism, the beat and cadence of jazz, early English prose-poetry, his Kagyu Buddhist practice and his Jewish background. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Allen+Gins
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Irwin Allen Ginsberg (/ˈɡɪnzbɜːrɡ/; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions.
Best known for his poem "Howl", Ginsberg denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized copies of "Howl" in 1956 and a subsequent obscenity trial in 1957 attracted widespread publicity due to the poem's language and descriptions of heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made male homosexual acts a crime in every state. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, asking: "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?".
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1926 births1997 deaths20th-century American Buddhists20th-century American diarists20th-century American Jews20th-century American male writers20th-century American poetsActivists from New York (state)American anti–nuclear weapons activistsAmerican anti–Vietnam War activistsAmerican cannabis activistsAmerican expatriates in France