Ginsberg’s Prophetic Guru

For Allen Ginsberg, Blake was more than a poetic influence, he was a spiritual forefather. Blake played an integral role in Ginsberg’s relentless self-fashioning and Ginsberg repeatedly turned to Blake in his search for poetic and social freedoms. Blake became a figurehead of the drug-fuelled psychedelic revolution of which Ginsberg was part. But Ginsberg’s Blakeanism went far beyond the claims of the drug culture towards a more serious and thoughtful poetic engagement with freedom and form, influence and authenticity. Like many of the older generation of American poets, Ginsberg yoked Blake together with Whitman. He saw them as icons of gay and homosocial culture, who debunked the prejudices of social conservatism and advocated an ethic of sexual openness and communality. Blake became an aid to a more affectionate re-envisioning of the myth of America, where tenderness and embrace were a means to positive social action.