He finally finished Columbia in 1948 with high grades but was arrested when a drug-addict friend stored supplies in his apartment. Ginsberg was expelled from Columbia in 1945 for a series of minor infractions, then bummed around, working as a merchant seaman, a dishwasher, and a welder.

At Columbia, he met Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady, who would become central figures in the Beat movement.

Ginsberg attended Columbia University, intending to study law. Ginsberg’s father raised Allen and his older brother to recite poetry by Poe, Dickens, Keats, Shelley, and Milton. Her mental illness and death were the subjects of Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish.” Ginsberg was born in 1926 to a high school English teacher father and Marxist mother who later suffered a mental breakdown. The poem was an immediate success that rocked the Beat literary world and set the tone for confessional poetry of the 1960s and later. |a Exported from Connexion by Pitkin and loaded with m2btab.b in 2018.Poet Allen Ginsberg reads his poem “Howl” at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco.

Ginsberg poem howl