His last, longest talk was with William Burroughs, now 88, who’d introduced him to druggy-gay-hipster lowlife back in the ’40s, and whose novel “Naked Lunch” Ginsberg had coaxed out, edited and promoted; he said he’d expected to be afraid of death, but instead was exhilarated. He wept from time to time, but mostly seemed at peace-he even wrote a zany letter to Bill Clinton, asking for a medal of recognition “unless it’s politically inadvisable. Maybe Gingrich may not mind.” And he made a last request to his agent, Andrew Wylie. “My ‘Selected Poems’ weren’t reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. Can you do something about it?” On Thursday night he slipped into a coma. At 2:39 Saturday morning, his heart stopped. He was 70 years old.

Even on his deathbed, Ginsberg remained the compulsive poet and the equally compulsive self-promoter-as he himself cheerfully acknowledged. “I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America,” he wrote in his 1974 poem “Ego Confession,” “who sang a blues made rock stars weep… who called the Justice department & threaten’d to Blow the Whistle/Stopt Wars… distributed monies to poor poets & nourished imaginative genius of the land.” This comic self-aggrandizement suggests the true range of his career. Ginsberg, the son of a New Jersey schoolteacher and minor poet, entered Columbia University intending to be a left-wing lawyer, then became a protege of two heavyweight literati, Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. But he soon fell in with a bad crowd–Burroughs, the young novelist Jack Kerouac, the proto-hipster Neal Cassady–and out of the literary, cultural, political and sexual mainstream. In 1956, his incantatory poem “Howl” made him notorious: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” At the time, “Howl” seemed to be a Dantesque tour of the Eisenhower era’s scary, repressed subconscious: buggery, blasphemy, benzedrine, be-bop and the bomb. In retrospect, it seems a prophecy of the hell-and the heaven–that was to break loose in the ’60s, the Big Bang after which American culture has continued to break apart and mutate in appalling, energizing directions.

Ginsberg derived his visionary bardic stance and long-breathed cadences from the Bible, Blake, Christopher Smart and Whitman-with special effects courtesy of speed, LSD and laughing gas. But he was no babbling naif. He’d worked as a market researcher and, briefly, as an apprentice book reviewer at NEWSWEEK. Generously and cannily, he prefaced “Howl” with surreally fulsome plugs for Kerouac (“new Buddha of American prose”), Burroughs and Cassady, all of whom were virtually unknown at the time; essentially he created the Beat Generation by believing and insisting that his friends were geniuses, and pushing their work as energetically as he pushed his own. He was 30 when he published “Howl”; during the “flower power” ’60s (he coined that term, by the way), when he led be-ins and antiwar demonstrations and helped “exorcise” the Pentagon, he was already middle-aged. In 1972 he took Buddhist vows. If they didn’t interfere much with his appetite for sex, drugs and hanging with rock stars, they surely deepened his sense of the transitory nature of these pleasures, and the void beyond. “The sun’s not eternal,” he once wrote; “that’s why there’s the blues.”

No wonder Ginsberg intuited what his doctors missed: he’d been preparing to die all throughout his outrageously full life. (Early last week his nurse told him he was HIV-negative. “That’s surprising,” he said, “given that I’ve had quite a lot lately.”) In an early, formalist poem, he anticipated passing “toward the last gates,” his soul “purified of Time by Time.” In 1959, purified of his Eliotic diction, he wrote: “I want to know what happens after I rot/ because I’m already rotting/… my ass drags in the universe.” In 1992 he predicted he wouldn’t live “another/20 years maybe not another/20 weeks.” But his best poems have a lot of years left. If so many seem to be elegies-for his mother (“Kaddish”), his aunt (“To Aunt Rose”) or his generation (“Howl”)–it’s no accident. Ginsberg’s lifelong work was to say goodbye: in joy and sorrow, love and longing. And to remind us that ours is, too.