Allen Ginsberg

terminal liver cancer, and he suffered a fatal heart attack, Morgan said.

''He made us see that poets were pop stars,'' said Lenny Kaye, guitarist with the Patti Smith Group and a recent Ginsberg collaborator. ''He had a sense of liberation - sexual and philosophical.''

Ginsberg, whose blend of drug-inspired visions, hedonistic sex and gut-wrenching autobiography first emerged during the 1950s, spent several days in a hospice after his diagnosis. On Thursday, he suffered a stroke, fell into a coma, and never regained consciousness.

He had returned to his apartment a day earlier after expressing a desire to die at home. He wrote about a dozen short poems - one titled On Fame and Death - and ''wore himself out talking to friends,'' Morgan said.

David Cope, a friend and

fellow poet, received one of those phone calls. ''He called all of his old friends from many generations personally to make contact with us one last time, voice to voice,'' Cope said. ''To me, it was a beautiful gesture.''

Ginsberg's influence was almost inestimable. His extraordinary list of acolytes ran the gamut from Abbie Hoffman to Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan, Czech President Vaclav Havel to punk poetess Patti Smith, Yoko Ono to

Bob Dylan.

''Dylan said he was the greatest influence on the American poetic voice since Whitman,'' said Gordon Ball, Ginsberg's editor and friend of 30 years. ''I think that's certainly true.''

During the conservative, McCarthy-era 1950s, when TV's married couples slept in separate beds, Ginsberg wrote Howl - a profane, graphic poem that dealt with his own homosexuality and communist upbringing.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked the poem began.

Howl then careened wildly through scores of surreal images: a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes people who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open a room full of steam heat and opium.

Howl was dedicated to Carl Solomon, a patient he met during a stay in a psychiatric ward. Forty years later, Ginsberg was reciting his poetry on MTV for Generation X-ers.

Ginsberg's poetry placed spontaneity over metered verse, frank language over flowery words. His work was often confessional, discussing his homosexuality, his mother's death, his relationships.

Kaddish, one of his most famous works, was an Oedipal poem dealing with his mother's life and death in a mental hospital. It was written in his Manhattan apartment, stream of consciousness-style, fuelled by a combination of amphetamines and morphine.

His first exposure to the nascent counter-culture came when he was a 17-year-old Columbia University freshman. There he met fellow future

beatniks and leaders of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. The group, disillusioned by conventional society, created their own subculture of drugs and hedonism.

''Basically, just a gang of friends who were very into being literate, and who were interested in art, and loved

each other.'' Ginsberg once

said of the Beat Generation's founding fathers: ''Some gay, some straight.''

Ginsberg was gay, and became a proponent of homosexual rights - one of many causes the activist poet embraced.

In 1960, he appeared on television to call for the decriminalisation of marijuana. He was arrested in 1967 for protesting against the Vietnam War

in New York, and was tear-gassed a year later while protesting at the Democratic convention in Chicago.

He claimed that FBI director J Edgar Hoover had placed him on a ''dangerous security list'' in 1965, a distinction that led to

airport strip-searches for several years whenever he returned to the United States.

Last year, he was one of the plaintiffs in a US Supreme Court case aimed at knocking down federal regulations on the hours that ''indecent programming'' could air on television and radio.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, the second son of poet Louis Ginsberg and his wife Naomi. The family moved to Paterson, NJ, while Ginsberg was a youngster.

Ginsberg intended to follow his brother Eugene into the legal profession, and enrolled at Columbia. But while still a teenager, he fell in with the crowd that included Kerouac, Burroughs and Cassady.

''I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs when I was 17 that I realised I was talking through an empty skull,'' Ginsberg once said.

''I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my

own thoughts.''

Another seminal event in Ginsberg's life came in 1948: his vision of poet William Blake while he was lying on the couch of his East Harlem apartment. Ginsberg said he had a ''hallucination in 3-D'' of Blake reading his poem Ah, Sunflower.

Ginsberg's first taste of notoriety came after the publication of Howl in 1956. Copies of the book were seized by San

Francisco police and US Customs officials, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing an obscene book.

In a 1991 interview with Associated Press - where Ginsberg briefly worked as a copy boy in 1948 - he recalled the fifties as a time of ''total paranoia, suspiciousness, fear, the rich robbing the poor, and complaining about the poor Marketised, mechanised fake emotions.''

Ferlinghetti was acquitted in 1957, but the case generated enormous publicity for Ginsberg and his work. Ginsberg was suddenly in demand.

Ginsberg experimented heavily with drugs, taking LSD under the guidance of the late Timothy Leary in the 1960s.

But he was also a practising

Buddhist and began each day

with a contemplative exercise

followed by a cup of hot tea with lemon.

As he grew older, Ginsberg became a guru to the counterculture movement. He coined the term ''flower power'' during the mid-60s. And he eventually became more accepted by

the mainstream.

His National Book Award came in 1973 for The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971. He was a finalist for

a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in

1995 for his book, Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992.

Ginsberg toured with Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in

1977, doing spontaneously composed blues poems. He toured eastern Europe in 1986, receiving an award in the former Yugoslavia, recording with a Hungarian rock band, and meeting a congress of young Polish poets.

Ginsberg remained vital and active well into his sixties,

performing in Manhattan nightclubs and doing poetry readings. Last year, he recorded his poem The Ballad of the Skeletons with musical backing from Paul McCartney and Philip Glass.

He was survived by his stepmother Edith, his brother Eugene; and several nieces and nephews.