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Description of  Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness

1531502660 pdf A revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed experiences of mental illness and madness into some of the most powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century. Allen Ginsbergs 1956 poem Howl opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. Thirty years later, Ginsberg entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness. In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student, examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric hospitalization, his mothers devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them. Though madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsbergs showed how it could also lead to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social changes. Through his revolutionary poetry and social advocacy, Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of being human and easing pain. Throughout his celebrated career Ginsberg made us feel as though we knew everything there was to know about him. However, much has been left out about his experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother, his visions, and his psychiatric hospitalization. In Read more