Allen Ginsberg

Plutonian Ode and Other Poems, 1977-1980

Allen Ginsberg

• 1982 LATimes–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.32

Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971

Allen Ginsberg

• 1974 NBA–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.24

Dedicated to Walt Whitman, these poems continue the Good Gray Poet’s project of chronicling the whole of America. For Ginsberg, however, America is less to be praised than to be scolded, and as he travels from place to place in these poems, he exhorts the country to be more just, more peaceful, and more free. These poems were written when Ginsberg was at his most active politically, but they aren’t strictly business: there are several erotic reveries, as well.

Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992

Allen Ginsberg

• 1995 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.45

Half a century after “founding” the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg has written this powerful collection of poems that are suffused with a range of emotional colors that gives Ginsberg’s work an elegiac tone.