YEAR V - THE BEAT GENERATION

he Beat Generation is a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. Central elements of Beat culture are rejection of standard narrative values, spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature. Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The core group of Beat Generation authors – Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Jack Kerouac – met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York City. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs and Carr) ended up together in San Francisco where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance.
In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements. Neal Cassady, the driver for Ken Kesey's bus "Further", was the primary bridge between these two generations. Allen Ginsberg's work also became an integral element of early 1960s hippie culture.

ORIGIN OF THE NAME "BEAT GENERATION"
Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes. Kerouac allows that it was street hustler Herbert Huncke who originally used the phrase "beat", in an earlier discussion with him. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down" within the African-American community of the period and had developed out of the image "beat to his socks", but Kerouac appropriated the image and altered the meaning to include the connotations "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of being "on the beat".

Sexuality

One of the key beliefs and practices of the Beat Generation was free love and sexual liberation, which strayed from the Christian ideals of American culture at the time. Some Beat writers were openly gay or bisexual, including two of the most prominent (Ginsberg and Burroughs). Some met each other through gay connections, including David Kammerer's interest in Lucien Carr.
For authorities, one of the most contentious features of Ginsberg's poem Howl were lines about homosexual sex. William Burroughs' Naked Lunch contains content dealing with same-sex relations and pedophilia. Both works were unsuccessfully prosecuted for obscenity. Victory by the publishers helped to keep down literary censorship in the United States.^[4][5]
Considered racy at the time, Kerouac's writings are now considered mild. On the Road mentions Neal Cassady's bisexuality without comment. However, the first novel does show Cassady as frankly promiscuous. Kerouac's novels feature an interracial love affair (The Subterraneans), and group sex (The Dharma Bums). The relationships among men in Kerouac's novels are predominantly homosocial.

Culture and influences

Drug use

The original members of the Beat Generation used a number of different drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, benzedrine, morphine, and later psychedelic drugs such as peyote, Ayahuasca, and LSD. They often approached drugs experimentally, initially being unfamiliar with their effects; their drug use was broadly inspired by intellectual interest and many Beat writers felt their drug experiences enhanced creativity, insight or productivity. The use of drugs was a key influence on many of the social events of the time that were personal to the Beat generation.

Romanticism

Gregory Corso considered English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley a hero, and he was buried at the foot of Shelley's grave in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's poem Adonais at the beginning of his poem Kaddish, and cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab. In other words, ROMANTICISM WAS A STRONG INFLUENCE ON THE BEAT GENERATION!

Ginsberg's main Romantic influence was William Blake, and studied him throughout his life. Blake was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination and revelation in 1948. The first time Michael McClure met Ginsberg, they talked about Blake: McClure saw him as a revolutionary, while Ginsberg saw him as a prophet. Romantic poet John Keats was also cited as an influence.

Early American sources

The Beats were inspired by early American figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and especially Walt Whitman, who is addressed as the subject of one of Ginsberg's most famous poems, A Supermarket in California. Edgar Allan Poe was occasionally acknowledged, and Ginsberg saw Emily Dickinson as having an influence on Beat poetry. The 1926 novel You Can't Win by outlaw author Jack Black was cited as having a strong influence on Burroughs.

French surrealism

In many ways, Surrealism was still considered a vital movement in the 1950s. Carl Solomon introduced the work of French author Antonin Artaud to Ginsberg, and the poetry of André Breton had direct influence on Ginsberg's poem Kaddish. Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, John Ashbery and Ron Padgett translated French poetry. Second-generation Beat Ted Joans was named "the only Afro-American Surrealist" by Breton.
Philip Lamantia introduced Surrealist poetry to the original Beats. The poetry of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman shows the influence of Surrealist poetry with its dream-like images and its random juxtaposition of dissociated images, and this influence can also be seen in more subtle ways in Ginsberg's poetry. As the legend goes, when meeting French Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie. Other influential French poets for the Beats were Guillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.

Modernism

Though the Beat aesthetic posited itself against author T. S. Eliot's creed of strict objectivity and literary modernism's new classicism, a few modernist writers were major influences on the Beats, including Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Pound was particularly important to Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.
American poet William Carlos Williams was also an influence on many of the Beats, encouraging them to speak with an American voice instead of imitating the European poetic voice and European forms. When Williams came to Reed College to give a lecture, then-students Snyder, Whalen, and Welch were extremely impressed by him. Williams became a personal mentor to Ginsberg, both being from Paterson, New Jersey.
Williams published several of Ginsberg's letters to him in his epic poem Paterson and wrote an introduction to two of Ginsberg's books. Many of the Beats (especially Ginsberg) helped promote Williams' writing, and Lawrence Felinghetti's publishing company City Lights published a volume of his poetry.
Gertrude Stein was the subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch. Admitted influences for Kerouac include Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.

Topics

A section devoted to the beat generation at a bookstore in Stockholm, Sweden

While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the Beats, the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had an influence on American culture leading more broadly to the hippie movements of the 1960s.





In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of "the essential effects" of the Beat Generation:

• Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.
• Liberation of the world from censorship.
• Demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis and other drugs.
• The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works.
• The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a "Fresh Planet."
• Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.
• Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization.
• Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation.
• Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing."