Editing Allen Ginsberg (section)

===Style and technique===
From the study of his idols and mentors and the inspiration of his friends—not to mention his own experiments—Ginsberg developed an individualistic style that's easily identified as Ginsbergian.<ref>{{Cite journal |author=Gorski, Hedwig |title=Interview with Robert Creeley |journal=Journal of American Studies of Turkey |date=Spring 2008 |pages=73–81 |issue=27 |url=http://www.ake.hacettepe.edu.tr/Install/JASTFiles/jast27.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120328094817/http://www.ake.hacettepe.edu.tr/Install/JASTFiles/jast27.pdf |issn=1300-6606 |archive-date=March 28, 2012 |access-date=October 10, 2011}}</ref> Ginsberg stated that Whitman's long line was a dynamic technique few other poets had ventured to develop further, and Whitman is also often compared to Ginsberg because their poetry sexualized aspects of the male form.<ref name="auto"/><ref name="Deliberate" /><ref name="Spontaneous" />

Many of Ginsberg's early long line experiments contain some sort of [[Anaphora (rhetoric)|anaphora]], repetition of a "fixed base" (for example "who" in ''Howl'', "America" in ''America'') and this has become a recognizable feature of Ginsberg's style.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Jackson |first=Brian |date=2010 |title=Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/751273038 |journal=[[Texas Studies in Literature and Language]] |volume=52 |issue=3 |pages=298–323 |doi=10.1353/tsl.2010.0003 |s2cid=162063608 |id={{ProQuest|751273038}} }}</ref> He said later this was a crutch because he lacked confidence; he did not yet trust "free flight."<ref>{{Cite book |title=On the poetry of Allen Ginsberg |date=1984 |publisher=University of Michigan Press |editor=Hyde, Lewis |isbn=0-472-09353-3 |location=Ann Arbor |page=82 |oclc=10878519}}</ref> In the 1960s, after employing it in some sections of ''Kaddish'' ("caw" for example) he, for the most part, abandoned the anaphoric form. 'Latter-Day Beat' Bob Dylan is known for using anaphora, as in 'Tangled Up in Blue' where the phrase, returned to at the end of every verse, takes the place of a chorus.<ref name="Deliberate" /><ref name="Spontaneous" />

Several of his earlier experiments with methods for formatting poems as a whole became regular aspects of his style in later poems. In the original draft of ''Howl'', each line is in a "stepped triadic" format reminiscent of [[William Carlos Williams]].<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last=Van Durme |first=Debora |date=May 2014 |title=Classical myth in Allen Ginsberg's Howl |url=https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/162/600/RUG01-002162600_2014_0001_AC.pdf |url-status=live |journal=Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/162/600/RUG01-002162600_2014_0001_AC.pdf |archive-date=October 9, 2022}}</ref> He abandoned the "stepped triadic" when he developed his long line although the stepped lines showed up later, most significantly in the travelogues of ''The Fall of America''.{{citation needed|date=August 2012}} ''Howl'' and ''Kaddish'', arguably his two most important poems, are both organized as an inverted pyramid, with larger sections leading to smaller sections. In ''America'', he also experimented with a mix of longer and shorter lines.<ref name="Deliberate" /><ref name="Spontaneous" />

Ginsberg's mature style made use of many specific, highly developed techniques, which he expressed in the "poetic slogans" he used in his Naropa teaching. Prominent among these was the inclusion of his unedited mental associations so as to reveal the mind at work ("First thought, best thought." "Mind is shapely, thought is shapely.") He preferred expression through carefully observed physical details rather than abstract statements ("Show, don't tell." "No ideas but in things.")<ref>Rabinowitz, Jacob, ''Blame it on Blake'', Amazon/Independent 2019, {{ISBN|978-1-09513-905-9}}, pp. 55–63.</ref> In these he carried on and developed traditions of modernism in writing that are also found in Kerouac and Whitman.

In ''Howl'' and in his other poetry, Ginsberg drew inspiration from the [[epic poetry|epic]], [[free verse]] style of the 19th-century American poet [[Walt Whitman]].<ref>Ginsberg, Allen ''Deliberate Prose'', pp. 285–331.</ref> Both wrote passionately about the promise (and betrayal) of American democracy, the central importance of erotic experience, and the spiritual quest for the truth of everyday existence. [[J. D. McClatchy]], editor of the ''[[Yale Review]]'', called Ginsberg "the best-known American poet of his generation, as much a social force as a literary phenomenon." McClatchy added that Ginsberg, like Whitman, "was a bard in the old manner—outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant. His work is finally a history of our era's psyche, with all its contradictory urges." McClatchy's barbed eulogies define the essential difference between Ginsberg ("a beat poet whose writing was&nbsp;[...] journalism raised by combining the recycling genius with a generous mimic-empathy, to strike audience-accessible chords; always lyrical and sometimes truly poetic") and Kerouac ("a poet of singular brilliance, the brightest luminary of a 'beat generation' he came to symbolise in popular culture&nbsp;[...] [though] in reality he far surpassed his contemporaries&nbsp;[...] Kerouac is an originating genius, exploring then answering—like [[Arthur Rimbaud|Rimbaud]] a century earlier, by necessity more than by choice—the demands of authentic self-expression as applied to the evolving quicksilver mind of America's only literary virtuoso&nbsp;[...]").<ref name="NYT">{{Cite news |last=Hampton, Willborn |date=April 6, 1997 |title=Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet Of Beat Generation, Dies at 70 |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/06/nyregion/allen-ginsberg-master-poet-of-beat-generation-dies-at-70.html}}</ref>