Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet born in Newark, New Jersey. Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about consumer society's negative human values and the self-destruction of his friends among the beat generation. Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by modernism, romanticism, the beat and cadence of jazz, his Kagyu buddhist practice and his jewish background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed from the English poet and artist William Blake on to visionary and homoerotic poet Walt Whitman.

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