Allen Ginsberg — "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical …"
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.
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American Beat poet whose Howl (1956) faced an obscenity trial and became a counterculture manifesto.
Closely associated with
Jack Kerouac (Beat novelist, On the Road) and William S. Burroughs (fellow Beat, Naked Lunch).
For an intellectual contrast, see
T.S. Eliot, high-modernist poet of The Waste Land — Ginsberg's open-line confessional Beat verse was a deliberate rejection of Eliot's allusive academic formalism — the two halves of mid-century American poetry.