A hero of some on the cultural left, 20th century Beat poet Allen Ginsberg is apparently less known to today’s college students. But Alexander Riley, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), thinks he should be remembered—and not for his terrible poetry. In a piece this month at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Dr. Riley notes that he recently cited him to students as an ugly example of higher education’s descent into decadence.
In his undergraduate course on America society and culture, which included discussion of the sexual revolution, many remained unaware of who Ginsberg was despite his undeservedly high status as a literary figure. Believing his “important and bizarre role in American cultural history” should be explained to them, Dr. Riley, a sociologist at Bucknell University, provided “some appropriate facts about his life.”
Ginsberg was a member and “outspoken and fervent supporter” of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). “[M]uch evidence exists,” adds Dr. Riley, “that he lived his life according to its principles.”
“As I told my students, it says something significant about the cultural politics of the contemporary university, and American literary culture … that Ginsberg is so lionized there, despite all the evidence that he was an active ideological supporter of sex with children and a personal participant in acts that legally would have been defined as statutory rape.” Some of his literary output reflects vividly suggests this: “Ginsberg wrote a good deal of poetry dealing with the topic of sexual interaction with boys, all available in his collected works … [and some] seem to be expressing the intentional desire to contract sexually transmitted disease.”
Dr. Riley points out that Ginsberg’s case— “almost none of his poetic work rises above the level of dreck”—is not the more familiar one of great artistry that is incidentally tarnished by bad personal qualities or bad beliefs. In contrast, Richard Wagner and jazz great Miles Davis “produced music of lasting value” and were simultaneously “unpleasant characters.” But Davis did not have an album called I Like to Beat the Women I Love, nor did Wagner write an opera called The Jewish Problem.
Leave A Comment