Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness

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.)