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Best minds : how Allen Ginsberg made revolutionary poetry from madness /

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 el...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Clasificación:Libro Electrónico
Autor principal: Weine, Stevan M., 1961- (Autor)
Formato: Electrónico eBook
Idioma:Inglés
Publicado: New York : Fordham University Press, 2023.
Edición:First edition.
Temas:
Acceso en línea:Texto completo
Descripción
Sumario: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 achieve­ments, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.--
Descripción Física:1 online resource (xvii, 290 pages) : illustrations (black and white), portraits
Bibliografía:Includes chapter notes with bibliographical references (pages 253-270), and index.
ISBN:9781531502683
1531502687