Best Minds : How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness / Stevan M. Weine.
Weine, Stevan M., author.
2023
PS3513.I74
Available Online

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Title Best Minds : How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness / Stevan M. Weine.
Author Weine, Stevan M., author.
ISBN 9781531502683
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9781531502683
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2023]
Copyright ©2023
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (304 p.) : 37 b/w illustrations
Other Standard Identifiers 10.1515/9781531502683 doi
Call Number PS3513.I74
Dewey Decimal Classification 811/.54
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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mai 2023)
In EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023
EBOOK PACKAGE Literary Studies 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE Literary Studies 2023
Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
Linked Resources Online Access
Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
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Frontmatter
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Advance praise for Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness
Chapter 1 Death and Madness, 1997-1998
Chapter 2 An Unspeakable Act, 1986-1987
Chapter 3 Refrain of the Hospitals and the New Vision, 1943-1948
Chapter 4 The Actuality of Prophecy, 1948-1949
Chapter 5 The Psychiatric Institute, 1949-1950
Chapter 6 Mental Muse-eries, 1950-1955
Chapter 7 Gold Blast of Light, 1956-1959
Chapter 8 A Light Raying through Society, 1959-1965
Chapter 9 White and Black Shrouds, 1987
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX

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