Kaddish (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Allen Ginsberg
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Elegy
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Mothers, Parents and children, New York City, Poetry or poets, Mental illness, Immigration or emigration, Jews or Jewish life, Singing or singers, Death or dying, Bereavement or grief, Rites or ceremonies, Paranoia
One of the central formative experiences of Ginsberg's life was the decline into mental illness of his mother, Naomi, a wrenching psychic ordeal that he internalized for the first four decades of his life before confronting his feelings in the poem “Kaddish,” which he composed in bursts of confessional exhilaration from 1958 through 1961. The trigger for the central narrative section of the poem, a biographical recollection of his mother's life, was a night spent listening to jazz, ingesting marijuana and methamphetamine, and reading passages from an old Bar Mitzvah book.
...[The entire page is 1261 words long]
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