Allen Ginsberg — "To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
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About Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
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.