The essays in this book by American poet, essayist, and ideologist of the Beat movement Allen Ginsberg are bold and honest statements about freedom of speech, state tyranny, drug culture, and sexuality, as well as thoughtful and ironic reflections on spirituality, poetics, and the origins and achievements of the Beat generation. Ginsberg never tolerated injustice and hypocrisy, instantly reacting to the most painful phenomena of postwar American public life, tirelessly calling for the expansion of personal freedoms and passionately opposing the transformation of his country into a militaristic police state.

A special place in the collection is given to essays dedicated to writers, artists, and musicians whose mastery, creative instinct, and inner freedom Ginsberg admired. Among the subjects of these essays are William Blake and Walt Whitman, Jean Genet and Jack Kerouac, W.H. Auden and Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Philip Glass and John Cage.