The most famous of the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg - friend and contemporary of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and the poetic voice of a restless generation - is still best known for his earliest published poem, Howl (1956). First performed in San Francisco to an exuberantly appreciative audience, it was an authentic revolt against middle-class social mores and the political establishment of the day.

Following the huge success of Howl, Ginsberg emerged as a bona fide hipster guru of iconic status, the organising central figure of the growing Beat movement.

Kaddish, his 1961 collection, saw a move towards incorporating more intimate details of his family history, drawing in particular on his mother's psychosis and recent death. The resultant poems are among his most powerfully moving and memorable.

Ginsberg continued to write and perform globally over the next two decades, extolling the various joys of mind-altering drugs, gay sex, spiritualism and peace. His latter output is uneven, to say the very least. While owing an obvious debt to Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose work a century earlier had confidently articulated radical views on politics and sex, in the 1950s Ginsberg and his fellow Beats, revolutionised (if only briefly) the nature of poetic discourse.