Best minds : how Allen Ginsberg made revolutionary poetry from madness

Best minds How Allen Ginsberg made revolutionary poetry from madness

Stevan M. Weine, 1961-

Book - 2023

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 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 mother's devastating illness, confinement, and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and imaginatively transformed them.... 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 in the 1940s and 1950s. In light of these new discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his achieveƯments, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.

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Subjects
Ginsberg, Allen, > 1926-1997 > Criticism and interpretation.
Ginsberg, Allen, > 1926-1997 > Mental health.
Ginsberg, Allen, > 1926-1997.
1900-1999
Literature and mental illness > United States > History > 20th century.
Mental illness in literature.
Literature and mental illness.
United States.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.
Literary criticism.
Biographies.
Genres
Criticism, interpretation, etc
History
Literary criticism
Biographies
Published
New York : Fordham University Press 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
Stevan M. Weine, 1961- (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xvii, 290 pages : illustrations (black and white), portraits ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes chapter notes with bibliographical references (pages 253-270), and index.
ISBN
9781531502669
  • 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
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this revealing study, psychiatry professor Weine (Testimony After Catastrophe) explores the role of mental illness in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg (1926--1997). "Allen's poetics involved a lifelong imaginative and hopeful reworking of many different experiences of mental illness and madness," Weine contends, interpreting Ginsberg's poems through the lens of his personal life. Drawing on Ginsberg's archives and psychiatric records, Weine offers a close reading of doctors' notes from Ginsberg's 10-month stay at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 1949 while the poet was an undergrad at Columbia and suggests that Ginsberg's time there led him to see madness as simultaneously "damaging" and "liberating." Weine posits that Ginsberg's relationship with his schizophrenic mother, Naomi, fundamentally shaped his views on mental illness, especially Ginsberg's guilt over signing off on Naomi's lobotomy and his rendering of her struggle as a "heroic battle" in his "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg." The author brings nuance to Allen's views on mental illness, arguing that Allen had more ambivalent feelings about the anti-psychiatry movement than one might expect, and the author's privileged access to material on the poet's and Naomi's institutionalizations make this a valuable resource for future biographers. Fans of the Beat Generation will be enlightened. (Mar.)

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