Best minds : how Allen Ginsberg made revolutionary poetry from madness / Stevan M. Weine.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weine, Stevan M., 1961- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-1997--Criticism and interpretation.

Ginsberg, Allen.

Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-1997--Mental health.

Literature and mental illness.

Mental illness in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (313 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2023]

Summary:

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 Ginsberg’s 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 which 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 mother’s devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the post-war world and imaginatively transformed them. Though madness is often linked with hardship and suffering, Ginsberg’s 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 Best Minds, with a forty-year career studying and addressing trauma, Weine provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process especially in relation to madness. Best Minds examines the complex relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and prophecy—using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer new, lively, and indispensable insights into an American icon. Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism, treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American psychiatry of the 1940s and 1950s.In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achievements, both as a poet and an advocate, are even more remarkable.

Contents:

Cover

Series Editors

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Prologue

1. Death and Madness, 1997-1998

2. An Unspeakable Act, 1986-1987

3. Refrain of the Hospitals and the New Vision, 1943-1948

4. The Actuality of Prophecy, 1948-1949

5. The Psychiatric Institute, 1949-1950

6. Mental Muse-eries, 1950-1955

7. Gold Blast of Light, 1956-1959

8. A Light Raying through Society, 1959-1965

9. White and Black Shrouds, 1987

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Series List

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781531502676

1531502679

9781531502683

1531502687

OCLC:

1356574203