China and the West

Allen Ginsberg and China : general
Allen Ginsberg turned to the Eastern world under the influence of Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder. He found his spiritual home in Buddhism, in Chinese Ch'an and Chinese poetics. He is not only familiar with the translated Chinese poems by them, but also experienced the Chinese culture in person. He has read the classics of Chinese Buddhism and the works of Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi. In addition to the poems of Li Bo, Du Fu, Su Shi, Wang Wei and Bai Juyi, he has read the works of modern Chinese poets such as Guo Moruo, Ai Qing, Shu Ting and Bei Dao. Ginsberg had also learned some Chinese verse skills such as image juxtaposition and employed them in his own poems. He said he 'tried to keep the language sufficiently dense in one way or another – use of primitive naïve grammar, elimination of prosey articles & syntactical sawdust, juxtaposition of cubist style images, or hot rhythm'. Of various means, perhaps the most imposrtant, aside from rhythm, is 'the image juxtaposition'.
When he visited China in 1984, he enjoyed reading the poems of Bai Juyi because he found they had common sentiment in Ch'an Buddhism. Many of Ginsberg's poems in the late period take as their subject Buddhist Meditation and ideas.
Allen Ginsberg, as well as other poets and writers of the Beat Generation, have found their last home for their anchorless heart in the classical Chinese poems and the Chinese thoughts and philosophy. And through their poems the essence of Chinese culture is also accepted and anderstood by many other Western people and influences their thoughts and life as well.