Celestial Homework is a specialized reading list for "Literary History of the Beat Generation,"
a course taught by Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute during the summer of 1977.
I put together this website about a decade ago, and it has since gone offline. I went through and found archived links for everything to put it back online.
To view a brief biography for each poet, click on their image and it will take you to their biography.
As many poems as possible are hyperlinked to an archived version of the poem. A copy of the original syllabus can be viewed at the end.
Sherwood Anderson
short story Hands from Winesburg Ohio
Antonin Artaud
City Lights Artaud Anthology: To Have Done With the Judgement of
God, Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society
William Blake
Songs of Innocence and Experience, Thel
Ray Bremser
Poem of Holy Madness Part IV from Don Allen Anthol.
William S. Burroughs
Selections from Big Table, Naked Lunch
Neal Cassady
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
opening or any pages from Journey to End of Night or Guignol's Bowl
Jean Cocteau
Opium, see movies Blood of a Poet and Orpheus
Gregory Corso
Bomb, Power, Army, Police, Death,
Hair, Clown. All can be found in The Happy Birthday of Death.
Hart Crane
Voyages, The Hurricane, Havana Rose, The Bridge
Robert Creeley
Early poems in For Love
Diane Di Prima
*Revolutionary Letters: *April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa, 4, 24, 31, 37, 38, 54, 62, 63
Emily Dickinson
I Died for Beauty, I Heard a Fly Buzz, Because I Could Not Stop for Death,
Success is Counted Sweetest
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot, A Raw Youth, etc.
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Extra credit
Ernest Fenollosa
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium For Poetry
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
From Pictures of the Gone World: Numbers 2, 10, 13, 17
Jean Genet
Opening pages of Our Lady of the Flowers
Andre Gide
The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters
Allen Ginsberg
John Clellon Holmes
pages of Go and Nothing More to Declare on Kerouac
"The Great Rememberer"
Herbert Huncke
See material in Beat Book
Franz Kafka
Bob Kaufman
Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness: Second April, Abomunist Manifesto
John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Melancholy, Ode to Nightingale, Lines
Supposedly Addressed to Fanny Brawne
Jack Kerouac
Philip Lamantia
Selection in the Don Allen Anthol., poems from EXSTASIS and Blue Grace especially, see also -- Man in Pain, Terror Conduction, Put Down of Whore of Babylon, Morning Light Song, The Night in Space of White Marble, There is This
Distance Between Me, Fair Warning, from Selected Poems, City Lights, '67
Andrew Marvell
The Garden, To His Coy Mistress, The Bermudas, The Mower to the Glow Worms
Michael McClure
Poisoned Wheat, Fuck Ode, and Garland in Dark Brown. Browse through September Blackberries
Herman Melville
Poems:
The House Top, The Maldive Shark, The Portent, The Berg, The Muster, The Martyr, On the Slain Collegians, A Canticle, To Ned, Bridegroom Dick, Monody, America, The Ravaged Villa, the poem at end of Billy Budd; Bartleby the Scrivener, *Billy Budd , Moby Dick
Jack Micheline
Wanderer, Ballad of Benny Roads from Collected Poems
John Milton
L'allegro and Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Sonnet on his Blindness
Frank O'Hara
The Day Lady Died, A True Account of Talking to the Sun at
Fire Island
Peter Orlovsky
Selection in Beatitude Anthology and Don Allen Anthology
Edgar Allan Poe
Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Raven, The Bells
Ezra Pound
Sestina Altaforte, In Durance, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, "When the nightingale to his mate" in Personae,
Cantos: Usura 45, CXV, CXVII, CXX
Marcel Proust
taste a few pages from Swann's Way, Combray
Kenneth Rexroth
From Collected Shorter Poems:
Gic to Har, On What Planet, When We with Sappho, Floating, Letter to William Carlos Williams, The Lights in the Sky are Stars
Arthur Rimbaud
Drunken Boat, Season in Hell, Illuminations, letters
Ed Sanders
Poem from Jail (City Lights), Cemetery Hill in Peace Eye,
Death of Olson Poem, VFW Crawling Contest in 20,000 A.D.
William Shakespeare
The Tempest, Sonnets, Hamlet, Songs
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mont Blanc, The Cloud, Skylark, Adonais, Ozymandias, Ode West Wind, last lines Epipsychidion
Christopher Smart
Gary Snyder
From Turtle Island: The Bath, Mother Earth: Her Whales, The Hudsonian Curlew, The Wilderness; browse through Back Country
Carl Solomon
Report from the Asylum, Page 36 etc. Mishaps Perhaps, also
letter to Gov. Rockefeller, Artaud, etc.
Henry David Thoreau
How I Lived and What I Lived For from Walden
Philip Whalen
See selections in Don Allen Anthology. Also Regalia in Immediate
Demand in Severance Pay
Walt Whitman
John Wieners
Hotel Wentley Poems, and Poem for Trapped Things in Don Allen Anthol.
William Carlos Williams
from Collected Poems: To Elsie, Horned Purple, Smell, Danse Russe, A Goodnight, Thursday
Thomas Wolfe
First pages of Look Homeward Angel and You Can't Go Home
Again
Sir Thomas Wyatt
They Flee from me who sometime did me seeke; My Lute awake, perform the last; The long love that in my heart; Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hinde
William Butler Yeats
The Crazy Jane series, Sailing to Byzantium, The Second Coming, Among School Children
