"Taken all together, Ginsberg's poems are X-rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades." -- The New YorkerThis magnificent volume gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half-century of brilliant work from one of America's greatest poets. A chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Whitman, Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg's raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech, but also our views of the world.