Happy 100th, Allen Ginsberg!

Allen Ginsberg, the Columbia University grad, Beat poet, author of the famous poem “Howl,” hero of the San Francisco Renaissance, and friend of such countercultural icons as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, would celebrate his 100th birthday today if he were still with us (he’s two days younger than Marilyn Monroe — what a week that was in 1926!). Observances are underway worldwide, the Allen Ginsberg Project has organized a celebration, and HarperCollins has issued a list of titles to commemorate the centennial, including The Essential Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, Death & Fame, Howl, and Selected Poems 1947-1995.

In point of fact, Ginsberg is still with us in all but the most literal sense. Anyone who wants to grasp the lasting resonance of Ginsberg’s verse and ideas on the anniversary of his June 3, 1926, birth, could do worse than to watch (or rewatch) his famous discussion with conservative leader William F. Buckley, Jr., on the program Firing Line, which took place on May 7, 1968.

At the start of the interview, Buckley acknowledges Ginsberg as the most translated English-language poet alive at the time. The host’s tone throughout is one of wary respect. Given the identities of Buckley, founder of National Review and scourge of the 1960s New Left, and of Ginsberg, a celebrator of hedonism (and drugs) who declared in his poem “In a Baggage Room at Greyhound,” at the height of the Cold War and barely three years after the death of Stalin, that “I am a communist,” some might, of course, wonder how the two men could ever have been civil to each other. Yet their exchange on Firing Line is polite, wide-ranging, often funny, and rich with insights.

Indeed, apart from showing how civility used to work in America, and illuminating Ginsberg’s literary and cultural influences, it raises the still-pertinent question of how, exactly, to identify Ginsberg and his fellow Beats. Can they really be shoehorned into the ideological divide of the 1960s, or indeed any era? And what do they say to us today?

Near the start of the discussion, the two men attempt to establish just what it is that Ginsberg and his fellow Beats stand for. One thing the Beats believe in, Ginsberg suggests, is greater individual freedom — a conviction that, he argues, would surely endear them to Buckley. But not just Buckley, of course. Ginsberg’s insight offers a key to his own literary and cultural identity no less than that of his friends Kerouac and Burroughs, who come up repeatedly during the interview. With their commitment to radical self-expression and unlimited opportunities for personal fulfillment, the Beats were at once conservative (in the classical sense) and radical, a living challenge to mores and means of control no matter what their provenance or stated purpose. (It is not widely discussed today, but Jack Kerouac was a registered Republican.)

Though he often disagrees with his guest, Buckley is anything but dismissive of a poet whose erudition is obvious at many points in the 50-minute interview, particularly when the guest brings Franz Kafka, William Blake, and William Wordsworth into the discussion. Buckley seems even more impressed with the iconoclasm of a poet at home neither in the traditional America for which National Review had such nostalgia nor in repressive states that would censor and control its creative minds.

It is no accident that Ginsberg mentions Kafka in the course of the interview, alluding to the bureaucracy and state control that led to the term Kafka-esque. But Ginsberg belongs to a uniquely American, postwar context. He is, first and foremost, an accomplished poet who synthesizes elements of such visionaries as Blake and Wordsworth. During the segment, Ginsberg reads out a lengthy, lush, evocative poem in full, to the seeming delight of the Firing Line audience. He recounts having taken LSD — of which Buckley does not approve, though Buckley would become known in later years for supporting legalization of some drugs — and praises the drug for having enlarged his perspective and helped him emulate Blake and Wordsworth as he set out to envision the poem’s rustic setting and commit it to paper. “I cited Blake and Wordsworth as having that natural vision,” Ginsberg says. “I think the LSD clarified my mind, and left it open to get that sense of giant, vast consciousness.”

When the discussion turns to international politics, the fresh iconoclasm devolves into something a bit more muddled. Buckley wants to know whether Ginsberg could get behind a just war, and prods him with a hypothetical question about whether the Beat master would support bombing a group of Nazis who were heading to a concentration camp to commit hundreds of thousands of murders. Ginsberg does not give a straight answer. Pressed on the question of just war, updated to the 1960s, Ginsberg says he is in favor of “buying out” Ho Chi Minh, a quixotic notion (given the North Vietnamese leader’s fierce nationalism) that Ginsberg argues would end the war without further U.S. intervention in the affairs of a foreign state or loss of life.

Political disagreements aside, no one who watched the interview could have come away doubting Ginsberg’s talent or his ability to speak in a unique voice fully invested with the influence of Blake. Ginsberg’s poem “Sunset” recounts Ginsberg’s experience as a passenger in a railway car at sunset, “my mind wandering / past the rust into futurity.” The poem has the formal simplicity of Blake, as well as imagery reminiscent of that genius’s flames and tigers, as the narrator recalls seeing the sun go down “in a carnal and primeval world.”

In other parts of his oeuvre, Ginsberg describes deceptively simple scenes that avoid hitting the reader over the head with themes or messages yet can subtly inspire doubt, fear, concern — as in “The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour,” in which one of the two laborers briefly puts his cap over the body of a stray kitten, not harming the tiny creature, at least in that part of the action narrated here, yet leaving us to shudder at the image of a street “darkening as if to rain,” as “the wind on top of the trees in the / street comes through almost harshly.” Why harshly? Maybe a collective consciousness speaks up here in the face of the danger to the kitten — the concern of that part of the natural world that can speak and render judgment for that part of it that cannot. Or maybe that is just a sensitive reader’s reaction to a phenomenon with no inherent meaning at all.

In “After Dead Souls,” a reference to the title of Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel, Ginsberg makes his concern for others’ moral abdication explicit, but in an ironic way, asking “Where O America are you / going in your glorious / automobile, careening” toward a likely crash in a “deep canyon / of the Western Rockies.” The other possible destination, he suggests, is a “wild city” on the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge, “jumping with jazz / on the Pacific Ocean!” The first of the two fates presented here is the one that awaits a rapacious capitalist spirit (symbolized by the fancy hot rod) intoxicated with its own potential and blind to its own recklessness, while the second is the destination of the hedonists Ginsberg himself represents.

But none of the other poetic achievements discussed here will ever overshadow “Howl,” : an icon of iconoclasm, a poetic roar of the 60s. A poem that destroyed forms and invented ways of thinking, doing, living, and writing as innovative in their way as the modernist literary project of the 1920s, it was a record of young students’ desperate striving, struggles, and pursuit of one another’s visions that hums with vigor even today. Paradoxically, it is a howl of existential despair and a celebration of life.

The poem is blessed with infinite vision of a world that could still come into being, even as its advocates lie “starving, hysterical, naked” amid cultural and political setbacks, with their political enemies ascendant. In the election of 1956, the year of the poem’s publication, Republican Dwight Eisenhower beat the Democrat Adlai Stevenson in a landslide, setting the stage for the very ideological battles Buckley and Ginsberg would later play out in person. The Allen Ginsberg who appeared on Firing Line one day in 1968 is still with us in spirit in 2026; eloquent and fierce as ever in his devotion to individual freedom and to the poetic art.