Allen Ginsberg reading Blake

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(Main article: Allen Ginsberg) In 1948 in an apartment in Harlem, Ginsberg had an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems "Ah Sunflower," "The Sick Rose," and "Little Girl Lost" (later referred to as his "Blake vision"). Ginsberg was reading these poems at the time, and he said he was very familiar with them; at one point he claimed he heard them being read by what sounded like the voice of God but what he interpreted as the voice of Blake himself. He had at that moment what he claimed to be pivotal revelations that defined his understanding of the universe. He believed that he witnessed then the interconnectedness of the universe. He looked at lattice work on the fire escape and realized some hand had crafted that; he then looked at the sky and concluded some hand had crafted that, or rather the sky was the hand that crafted itself. He claimed that this "vision" was not inspired by drug use, but he said he sought to recapture that feeling later with various drugs. William Blake, Walt Whitman, Zen Buddhism, were major influences on Ginsberg. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

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