Allen Ginsberg's work represents a culmination of modernist poetry while, being at the same time, a great example of the deconstruction of the modernist form. Ginsberg struggled to move away from the formal poetry styles that predominated the academic disciplines of literary criticism and writing in the mid-twentieth century. Both his life and his art inhabited a space outside of the mainstream. His poetry aimed to recreate patterns and conversation forms of speech using the free verse and long line as a template for experimentation. Though his poetry was initially rejected by critics and many contemporaries, Ginsberg's work came to exemplify the poetic styles of the Beat generation.