The Adventures Of The Imagination: Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish

IN A PARIS CAFÉ in November 1957, Allen Ginsberg began the initial notations for Kaddish. In Ginsberg: A Biography, by longtime friend and author Barry Miles, Miles explained how Ginsberg planned to "employ a poetic form that he was trying to attain in his own time. He wanted to write something that he would himself regard as 'awesome.' Weeping as he read Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind,' he knew that he wrote best himself when he cried; he hadn't wept over his typewriter in a year."