His friends and mentors weren’t faring well,
either. Lucien Carr was behind bars, imprisoned
for murdering David Kammerer, another Gins-
berg acquaintance, who had been stalking Carr
with the hopes of forcing him into a relationship.
Kerouac, who had helped Carr dispose of
evidence, had avoided a jail sentence by marry-
ing and moving to Michigan. Burroughs, fed up
with the New York scene, had relocated to
Texas. And if all that wasn’t taxing enough on
Ginsberg’s frail state of mind, his parents had
split up and Naomi Ginsberg was gradually slid-
ing into such a mental decline that Allen would
eventually be asked to sign papers authorizing
his mother’s lobotomy.
Ginsberg teetered at the edge of his limits. He
continued to write poetry with remarkable self-
discipline, even as his daily existence crumbled
and he himself began to question his sanity. His
friends began to wonder as well, especially when,
in 1948, Ginsberg announced to anyone who
would listen that he’d had a series of ‘‘visions’’
rooted in William Blake’s poetry, visions that
convinced him that he had a sacred vocation to
pursue poetry and pass along the minute partic-
ulars of his life and experiences to future gener-
ations, just as Blake’s voice had been handed
down through the ages.
At this point, a feature in Morgan’s biogra-
phy becomes especially useful. HarperCollins has
recently published a massive, 1,189-page, updated
edition of Ginsberg’sCollected Poems,encom-
passing all of Ginsberg’s published poetry, and
Morgan has included, in the margins of his biog-
raphy, the titles of poems and their page numbers
inCollected Poemscorresponding with the events
of Ginsberg’s life. Ginsberg always insisted that
his poetry was a ‘‘graph’’ of his mind, and this
feature in Morgan’s biography shows just how
precisely this was so. The poems written immedi-
ately following Ginsberg’s ‘‘Blake visions’’ (‘‘The
Eye Altering Alters All,’’ ‘‘On Reading William
Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose,’’’ ‘‘Vision 1948’’) are two
wrapped up in Ginsberg’s efforts to reproduce
and analyze his visions to be effective as poems,
whereas, a decade later, in ‘‘The Lion for Real,’’
he managed to be much more successful when he
was not so self-conscious.
Ginsberg’s artistic development accelerated
as his personal life dipped into a purgatory that
would supply him with the grist for an epic
poem. He was arrested after he allowed a group
of petty thieves to use his apartment as a
storehouse for stolen goods, and in a plea bar-
gain with prosecutors, he chose time in a sanita-
rium [sic] over time in jail. While undergoing
psychiatric evaluation, Ginsberg met Carl Solo-
mon, the brilliant yet pathologically unconven-
tional figure to whom ‘‘Howl’’ is dedicated. He
also met and was befriended by William Carlos
Williams, an acclaimed local poet well connected
with the publishing world and much more suited
to act as a Ginsberg tutor than anyone at
Columbia. Williams encouraged Ginsberg to
use American language and idiom in his poetry,
and Ginsberg took the advice to heart.
The poetry written shortly after Ginsberg’s
introduction to Williams, eventually published
in 1961 in a volume of early poems,Empty Mir-
ror,now published along with additional, previ-
ously unpublished poems in Martyrdom and
Artifice,represent nothing less than a chrysalis
between the derivative young Ginsberg and the
fully realized poet he would become. Some of the
work is still too self-consciously clever to repre-
sent anything other than an interesting exercise,
but there are diamonds to be found as well,
intimations that, for Ginsberg, content and
form were finally coming together. The discov-
ery was purely accidental. When Ginsberg tried
to impress Williams by breaking lines from his
journals into short poems similar to those writ-
ten by Williams, the elder poet responded enthu-
siastically. He praised the work and promised to
see it published. Ginsberg, like any eager young
pupil beaming from his teacher’s praise, pro-
ceeded to break his journals down into a hefty
volume’s worth of poems.
During this same period, Ginsberg’s spiri-
tual growth took an unexpected turn when Jack
Kerouac ‘‘discovered’’ Buddhism and suggested
that his friend look into it. Ginsberg would
always credit Kerouac for being the force behind
his lifelong devotion to and study of Buddhism,
but in reality Kerouac was far too preoccupied
with his travels and writing for an in-depth
study. Ginsberg, true to character, took a more
scholarly approach, and while two decades
would pass before Ginsberg would meet the
Tibetan master Cho ̈gyam Trungpa and formally
dedicate himself to Trungpa’s teachings, the ini-
tial studies proved significant, especially when he
moved to San Francisco and met Gary Snyder
and Philip Whalen, two poets who used Bud-
dhism and Eastern thought as anchors in
their work.Howl