“I’m churnin’ out novels like Beat poetry on Amphetamines” Lana Del Rey sings indolently and blithely in Brooklyn Baby and one can’t help but feel the lyrics, want to absorb them and, at the same time, comb them out. Because within them lies poetry, poetry so true that it flows as if in the veins and wanders in every breath, in every sigh.
The so-called Beat Generation is a literary subculture that flourished mainly in the post-war era of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Although Jack Kerouac, one of the most important and acknowledged of the Beat Generation, introduced and established the specific term around 1948 to describe the underground and non-conformist movement of New York, it was the poet Herbert Huncke who was inspired and used the word “beat” to describe this emerging genre of poetry.
The adjective “beat”, therefore, as a slang term of the African-American community, saw a peak in its use after the Second World War, with Jazz musicians, especially, using it, often in combination with other words, in the sense of “exhausted” (dead beat), “poor” (beat to his socks), “hurt” (beat down). Kerouac, however, appropriating the term, gave it a new lease of life, stuffing it with the meaning of optimism, ecstasy, and giving it a musical connotation, namely the idea of being in rhythm.
The beginning of the Beat generation can be traced back to 1944 at Columbia University, in New York, USA. Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Hal Chase, et al., some of the best-known Beat Poets, and later journalist and editor Lucien Carr met there. Their idea and need for a “New Vision” – a term borrowed from the Irish poet and writer W. B. Yeats – came as a reaction to the ideals of their teachers, which the Beat Poets considered conservative and unbearably formalistic.
The various events and the course of what led to the birth and flowering of Beat Poetry are innumerable. Some daily, others extravagant, all as unpredictable as the Beat Poets themselves, each affair, each meeting or event a stepping stone on the road to this rebirth. A key date proved to be the gathering in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, which was the first public poetry reading of the Beat Poets. This day marked a renaissance and simultaneously a revolution in poetry, under the influence of Jazz music, the philosophy of Zen poetry, and the three-line Japanese haiku poetry, surrealist artists and visionary poets such as William Blake.
After all, Beat Poetry was the very pulse of the thriving American culture of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Beat Poetry was a revolution—the breaking of suffocating literary ties to poetry. For this very reason, it managed to “go down” a step and magnetize the soul of the reader in a way that is fresh, but familiar to the soul.
In the context of anti-conventionality, spontaneity, and the catalysis of classical modes of narration, poems were created unlike any other before. Key characteristics of the Beat Generation, reflected in the subject matter of poems and writings, were sexual liberation and experimentation, the exploration of religion and spirituality, and at the same time the rejection of materialism. In parallel, the main pillar of artistic creation in the Beat Generation was the clear and raw depiction of human existence as well as experimentation with psychedelic drugs.
Lives, poems, writings and memoirs of the poets of the Beat Generation became books whose pages wrap the heart of the reader, drenching it with their blood, but keeping it intact within their words. Lives and poems that to this day inspire films and articles like this and the creation of art. Poems that touch lives and color them with meaning.
Or else:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars […]
Jack Kerouac
On The Road
References:
Poetry Foundation. (n.d.). The Beat Poets: An introduction to the midcentury countercultural poets who helped define a generation. Retrieved February 16, 2023, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/147552/an-introduction-to-the-beat-poets
Kerouac, J. (1957). On The Road. Viking Press.
