Allen Ginsberg

maybe allen ginsberg didn't change my life back when i was 18, but i will forever remember those impassioned days of being buried in his poetry, learning to punctuate like him, and my entire worldview expanding beyond my immediate circumstances - to India, to the rest of the world - because of him.

from wikipedia:

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. In the 1950s, Ginsberg was a leading figure of the Beat Generation, an anarchic group of young men and women who combined poetry, song, sex, wine and illicit drugs with passionate political ideas that championed personal freedoms.[1] Ginsberg's epic poem Howl, in which he celebrates his fellow "angelheaded hipsters" and excoriates what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States, is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation.

more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg