'I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys' Allen Ginsberg's poetry fomented a social and political revolution, and with its rawness and spontaneity changed the course of the American lyric. To read his profane and prophetic verses, about sex, death and America, as well as the humour of his humiliations and self-transformations, is to stretch consciousness and grasp an entire era.