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A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets

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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, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient      heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the      machinery of night . . .      — Allen Ginsberg , “ Howl ”

Beat poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New York City and on the West Coast, although San Francisco became the heart of the movement in the early 1950s. The end of World War II left poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder , Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso questioning mainstream politics and culture. These poets would become known as the Beat Generation, a group of writers interested in changing consciousness and defying conventional writing. The Beats were also closely intertwined with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance movement, such as Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan .

The battle against social conformity and literary tradition was central to the work of the Beats. Among this group of poets, hallucinogenic drugs were used to achieve higher consciousness, as was meditation and Eastern religion. Buddhism especially was important to many of the Beat poets; Snyder and Ginsberg both intensely studied this religion and it figured into much of their work.

Ginsberg’s first book, Howl and Other Poems , is often considered representative of the Beat poets. In 1956 Ferlinghetti’s press City Lights published Howl and Ferlinghetti was brought to trial the next year on charges of obscenity. In a hugely publicized case, the judge ruled that Howl was not obscene and brought national attention to Ginsberg and the Beat poets.

Besides publishing the Pocket Poets Series, Ferlinghetti also founded the legendary San Francisco bookstore City Lights. Still in operation today, City Lights is an important landmark of Beat Generation history. Several of the surrounding streets have been renamed after Beat poets as well, commemorating their important contribution to the cultural landscape of San Francisco.

Other Beat poets included Diane di Prima, Neal Cassady, Anne Waldman , and Michael McClure . Although William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac are often best remembered for works of fiction such as Naked Lunch and On the Road, respectively, they also wrote poetry and were very much part of the Beats as well; Kerouac is said to have coined the term “beat generation,” describing the down-and-out status of himself and his peers during the post-war years.

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Beat Poetry – Non-Conformity in the World of Poems

Every now and then, an extremely specific literary movement emerges. They are not as large as something like the Romantics, which were immensely large in scope and instead served as a specific movement within a very particular period. This is the case with Beat poetry. So, what is Beat poetry? What is the Beat Movement? Who were the Beat Poets? These are the kinds of questions that will receive attention throughout this article as I discuss various elements related to this relatively short movement in 20th-century literature. The Beats were also loved, and so this may be a good chance to see why that is the case.

Table of Contents

• 1 A Look at Beat Poetry
• 2 Summary of Beat Poetry
• 3 The History of Beat Poetry
• 4 The Characteristics of Beat Poetry
• 5 The Goals of the Beat Poets
• 6.1 Howl (1956) by Allen Ginsberg
• 6.2 A Coney Island of the Mind, 8 (1958) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• 6.3 Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) by Amiri Baraka
• 6.4 The American Way (1961) by Gregory Corso
• 6.5 Song for Baby-O, Unborn (1990) by Diane Di Prima
• 7.1 What Is Beat Poetry?
• 7.2 What Are the Characteristics of Beat Poetry?
• 7.3 Who Were the Beat Poets?
• 7.4 What Is the Beat Movement?
• 7.5 What Are Some Examples of Beat Poetry?

A Look at Beat Poetry

There have been many movements in literature, but few have been as influential on present-day literature as the work of the Beat Poets. This group would serve not only as an inspiration through their writing but also through the lives that they led. They worked to reject tradition and embrace non-conformity, creativity, and a focus on the individual. This article is all about them, but before we do get into their history for a while, let’s first see a summary.

Summary of Beat Poetry

When it comes to Beat poetry, there are a few things that need to be explored. For instance, what is Beat poetry in the first place? These sorts of questions will be answered in more depth after this particular section, but if you need a taster, then this should be beneficial to you:

• Beat poetry originated in the 1950s. The Beat Movement lasted for some time, but its heyday peaked throughout the 1950s and 1960s and burned hard and fast. Many members of the Beats had also been raised in privilege and saw the movement as a way of rebelling against it.
• Beat poetry was focused on non-conformity. While this is far from the only aspect of Beat poetry, it is a major part of it. Their work would often explore very taboo topics for the time, such as sexuality, drug use, and radical individualism. These figures became icons of a generation.
• The Beat Poets did not only write poetry. While we typically refer to this group as the “Beat Poets”, they did not solely produce poetry. One of the most famous texts from the movement was Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road . However, they are still often known as the Beat Poets.

This has been a brief summary of the things to come. Many more elements concern the Beat Generation, but a summary is hardly enough to cover it all.

So, if this summary has been a good means of whetting your appetite, you should head into the next section.

The History of Beat Poetry

Every poetic movement has some kind of a cause, something that leads it to be born, and in the case of Beat poetry, that thing was the culture of the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. After the war, there was an immediate pivot toward a new war, the Cold War. This war would lead to a major change in the culture of the country over the next few decades. The 1950s were particularly known for being a rather terrifying period to live through in the country because it was the time of nuclear terror. Everyone was afraid of what the communists would do, and the government and media made sure to reinforce this threat. This then led to a very particular form of conformist culture in which being a proud American was the standard.

Patriotism and adhering to the status quo became the norm, and out of that arose a few figures in the 1950s who would come to be known as the Beat Generation. These young writers would rebel against the conformity of society at the time and would instead embrace concepts such as radical individualism, sexual liberation, spontaneity, and freedom of choice. These Beat Poets were generally congregated in several major areas, such as the North Beach district in San Francisco and the Greenwich Village district in New York City.

These figures would call themselves the “beats” because it was meant to be a play on the idea of being weary. Many others, generally those who were in opposition to them, would instead use the term “beatnik” to describe them. However, they would continue with their more liberated lifestyles, which involved drug use, sexual freedom, and constant creativity. Some of the major figures who arose during the Beat Movement were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. However, many others would also call themselves Beat Poets even if they were not part of the major figures.

These Beat Poets would attempt to exemplify this freeform lifestyle and would focus on living their lives as genuinely as possible.

There was also a strong push toward a more progressive existence, and this was one of the many things that put them at odds with the highly conservative existence of American society at the time. This was also one of the reasons that after the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl , which is seen as the most important poetic text of the Beat Movement, it faced legal pushback and was even brought into an obscenity trial because of its frank depictions of drug use and homosexual sex.

During the 1960s, the relevance of the Beat Poets and Beat poetry in general would start to fade, but it did have a strong influence on the movements that would grow after it. For instance, the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s would take inspiration from the freedom-oriented lifestyles of the Beats. And while the movement is now dead, and so are the majority of the Beat Poets, their work still remains and continues to influence many around the world.

The Characteristics of Beat Poetry

When it comes to an understanding of Beat poetry, you need to keep in mind that their central idea was non-conformity. The Beat Poets wanted to go against what had come to be seen as normal and ordinary, and they would often push back on the conservative society of the United States at the time. This meant that their poetry would often focus on content that was deliberately non-conformist.

This can be seen in the way that many examples of Beat poetry would explore and discuss topics like drug use and sexuality with a frankness that was not seen in more traditional literature of the time. This is one of the major elements of Beat poetry that needs to be taken into account more so than necessarily the formal aspects of this movement’s chosen way of writing poetry.

The rebellious nature of Beat poetry did also influence the ways in which they wrote though. Many of the Beats were also involved in jazz. This musical influence would lead to the development of poetry that was generally more rhythmic in its presentation. It would often make use of a more chaotic style, and there was often a focus on spontaneity in their work.

Other than this, you can often find elements of Eastern religions in the work of the Beat Poets. Many took inspiration from things like Zen Buddhism to inform a way of living that was counter to the way that American society was structured. This would also be seen in the Beats’ general rejection of American values related to capitalism and elitism. They wanted to live their lives as genuinely as possible, and this translated into the way that they composed their poetry too.

The Goals of the Beat Poets

When we examine the work of the Beat Poets, we see that the movement was not solely about artistic creation. There was a very real political goal to the poetry that they produced. This poetry was a direct rejection of the kind of society that birthed the Beat Poets in the first place. Many of the earliest and most important figures in the Beat Generation grew up in the post-World War II period and were subjected to intense levels of patriotism and anti-left-wing propaganda because of its relation to communism. So, when these young writers grew up and went to university, they discovered that there was another way to live their lives. These early groups would become the basis for the Beats in general.

They would then have certain goals in mind when it came to the poetry that they wrote.

They wished to express themselves in a way that had not been allowed in more traditional society. They wanted to experiment with what all life had to offer, such as sex and drugs, and they wanted to write about these experiences too. These sorts of aspects of life have always existed, but it has traditionally been frowned upon to even consider writing about anything like this. The Beat Poets wanted to show the authenticity of life, and they wanted to be rebels against a society that wanted them to remain as conformist as possible. These more liberationist goals would lead to legal troubles for many of the Beat Poets, and a number of them died quite young because of the lifestyles that they led, such as Jack Kerouac’s heavy drinking. However, the spirit of their work would forever remain in the literature that they produced.

A Few Beat Poetry Examples

To understand and answer questions like, “who were the Beat Poets?”, you need to have a look at the kind of work that they produced. While there were also other projects produced by the Beat Poets, such as novels and visual art, there is often an association with poetry. They are also often referred to as the Beat Generation, but that poet moniker has managed to stick around for a very long time. To understand this movement, let’s get started and take a gander at the kind of work that these figures poured their hearts and souls into.

Howl (1956) by Allen Ginsberg

Howl is often considered to be an exemplary example of Beat poetry. It was written by one of the most integral members of the movement, and it came to be seen as one of the greatest poems of the mid-20 th century period in poetry. The poem is a lengthy text that explores a variety of topics, such as spirituality, mental health, sexual liberation, and numerous instances of social critique. One of the central aspects of Beat poetry in general, and this poem in particular, was the frankness with which it discussed a variety of personal experiences, such as the homosexual relationships that Ginsberg took part in (which was still very much frowned upon at the time, and it was one of the central reasons for an obscenity trial that was brought against him), his drug use, and personal struggles in life.

The poem would go on to become a battle cry for the non-conformists of the period.

A Coney Island of the Mind, 8 (1958) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

A Coney Island of the Mind, 8 is a notable poem from one of the most important writers in the Beat Generation. This example of Beat poetry was all about a singular moment within the world. In this case, it showed one moment in Golden Gate Park and what all occurred within that short period of time. There are people going about their lives, musicians, those eating oranges. This is the kind of poetry that would become common in the world of the Beat Poets because it was a perfect encapsulation of spontaneous creativity.

Was there some deeper reason that this singular moment was taken as one in particular or are all moments worth recording in our world?

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) by Amiri Baraka

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note is a poem that explores the concept of suicide, as the title would suggest. In this poem, the speaker discusses the feelings of a suicidal character who is currently experiencing existential despair. They are thinking about the difficulties of their life, such as loneliness and depression. However, the poem should also be understood within its broader context. The reason is that this particular poem serves as the preface to a larger collection, and so this poem can be seen as setting the general mood for what is to come in the following pages.

Making use of a poem in this way gives it a different kind of weight than if it was entirely on its own and understood in that sense.

The American Way (1961) by Gregory Corso

The American Way is a poem that serves as a powerful critique of American culture and society. The poem explores a number of different aspects of the United States, such as the use of religion as a means of commodification. The poem, as a whole, is highly critical of the conformist nature of the country, the way in which authenticity has become eroded over time as consumerism has taken the place of genuine symbols of human civilization, and the lack of individualism that is allowed to take place in American society.

The poem certainly comes from a particular period, but the critiques that it presents are still, in many ways, found in contemporary society, except that they have often spread far outside of the borders of the United States alone.

Song for Baby-O, Unborn (1990) by Diane Di Prima

Song for Baby-O, Unborn is a poem that is addressed to an unborn child, and so it can be seen as reflecting a parental perspective. The poem explores ideas related to parenthood, such as learning to be tender with one’s child and an awareness of the difficulties that this child will face if they are to be born. Poems of this nature show the more uncompromising perspective of the Beat Poets in that they understood that even those who are unborn will eventually find themselves in our world, and there are many difficulties and challenges to be found in our reality.

The Beat Generation has remained one of the most influential of all the countercultural movements in the 20th century, and, hopefully, this article has managed to elucidate the question: what is the Beat Movement? We spent our time having a look over the history of Beat poetry, the kinds of characteristics that it was known for, the goals of those who considered themselves part of the Beat Poets, and a bunch of Beat poetry examples to go over. However, there is still much to be learned from Beat poetry, and I would recommend reading more than what was only discussed here.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is beat poetry.

Beat poetry is a term that refers to the work produced by the Beat Generation. This 1950s and 1960s group was made up of several prominent figures and far more lesser-known individuals who were influenced by the work of the Beats. While the inspiration that was derived from Beat poetry has persisted into the present day, the actual era of Beat poetry predominantly came to an end during the 1960s.

What Are the Characteristics of Beat Poetry?

Some of the prominent characteristics of Beat poetry were elements such as rebellious language, the use of obscenities, the exploration of sexuality, the rejection of societal norms, and the adoption of musical elements, especially from jazz. Their work attempted to be more rhythmic, anti-authority, and would challenge the status quo. Beat poetry has remained influential to this day thanks to these elements.

Who Were the Beat Poets?

The Beat Poets were all members of the Beat Generation. These figures were part of a countercultural movement that developed through the 1950s and 1960s. Prominent members included figures like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. These writers would challenge the status quo of literature and rebelled against the kind of literary output that had come to be expected. They were considered to be rebels, and many more traditional writers were against them at the time.

What Is the Beat Movement?

The Beat Movement was a countercultural movement that originated in the United States. This group, known as the Beat Generation, were those who wished to work against the general conventions of the society in which they were raised. They would do this by taking from jazz culture, altering their dress to fly in the face of convention, and would engage in behaviors deemed incorrect by mainstream society, such as drug use. This movement was known for its defiance of societal norms.

What Are Some Examples of Beat Poetry?

There are some fantastic examples of Beat poetry, and some of the most famous include works such as Howl (1956) by Allen Ginsberg, A Coney Island of the Mind, 8 (1958) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and The American Way (1961) by Gregory Corso. The Beat Poets did write a lot more than this though, and there are novels and examples of visual artistry that also trace their lineage through the Beat Generation.

Justin van Huyssteen is a freelance writer, novelist, and academic originally from Cape Town, South Africa. At present, he has a bachelor’s degree in English and literary theory and an honor’s degree in literary theory. He is currently working towards his master’s degree in literary theory with a focus on animal studies, critical theory, and semiotics within literature. As a novelist and freelancer, he often writes under the pen name L.C. Lupus.

Justin’s preferred literary movements include modern and postmodern literature with literary fiction and genre fiction like sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, and horror being of particular interest. His academia extends to his interest in prose and narratology. He enjoys analyzing a variety of mediums through a literary lens, such as graphic novels, film, and video games.

Justin is working for artincontext.org as an author and content writer since 2022. He is responsible for all blog posts about architecture, literature and poetry.

Learn more about Justin van Huyssteen and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Justin, van Huyssteen, “Beat Poetry – Non-Conformity in the World of Poems.” Art in Context. March 5, 2024. URL: https://artincontext.org/beat-poetry/

van Huyssteen, J. (2024, 5 March). Beat Poetry – Non-Conformity in the World of Poems. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/beat-poetry/

van Huyssteen, Justin. “Beat Poetry – Non-Conformity in the World of Poems.” Art in Context , March 5, 2024. https://artincontext.org/beat-poetry/ .

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literary Terms and Techniques › An Introduction to the Beat Poets

An Introduction to the Beat Poets

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 9, 2020 • ( 0 )

The Beat poets were a group of friends living in New York City in the decade following World War II who, through their collaborations, experiments with poetry rhythms, and questioning of the status quo, forever altered the relationship of poetry to popular culture. The peak of their influence was during the late 1940s through the early 1960s, when their thematic explorations of sexuality and social class ushered in the hippie movement. Building on the freeverse, stream-of-consciousness, and collage styles explored by many modernist poets (see MODERNISM ), the Beats integrated rhythms found in jazz clubs with invocations of Eastern religions and Buddhist chants. They differed from the poets of the Imagist School by focusing on the immediacy of experience, as opposed to the precision of images. By representing and embracing the contradictions of contemporary lives on the fringe, they created an especially active and accessible poetry. Today the influence of the Beats is still felt in popular culture, through the popularity of coffee houses, poetry slams, and spoken word poetry.

The term beat was coined during a 1948 discussion between writers Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes about the weariness and alienation or, as Kerouac was to put it, the “beatness” of their generation. Holmes used the term twice in 1952: in a fictionalized biography called Go and in a New York Times Magazine article, “The Beat Generation” (Watson 3). The name caught on, making the term beatnik synonymous with an intellectual form of youth rebellion. Before long, the concept of “beat” was commodified by popular culture, inspiring Beatlike characters on film and television shows, such as on the sitcom Dobie Gillis. Media of the 1950s and 1960s were filled with images of the finger-snapping, turtleneck-wearing, goateed archetypal Beat, bearing little resemblance to the actual poets most closely associated with the movement.

A decade before the Beatnik fad began, a small network of outcast students, graduates, and dropouts from Columbia University’s English department hunkered down in New York cafés, challenging and encouraging each other to take their own writing in new and surprising directions. Inspired by such poets as Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, the Beats emphasized freethinking and spontaneous writing. Like their Black Mountain School counterparts, they celebrated the theme of individual experience and perception, and they saw their very lives as the active impetus by which poems were made.

The writers most central to the movement were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Their cohorts and muses came to include, over the years, Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, LeRoi Jones (later to be known as Amiri Baraka), Diane Di Prima, Carl Solomon, Peter Orvolosky, Carolyn Cassady, Michael Mcclure, and Lucien Carr. Many other writers were part of the larger Beat constellation, embracing the political and subversive possibilities of poetry and helping shape the rebelyouth culture that still resonates powerfully today.

The friendships among the Beat writers are as famous and enthusiastically chronicled as their actual creative output. During the late 1940s, the Beats often lived together in crowded New York apartments, worked together, and hit the road together to reveal in their writing the “real” America and Mexico. Through their associations, they tested their own spiritual, physical, and sexual boundaries, challenging the limits of their experience. There was a complex web of brotherhood, sexual desire, and emotional tumult.

Their transformative relationships were openly represented in poems and novels, usually with clever yet transparent aliases. And with their shared adventures as both content and context for their writing, they encouraged and critiqued each other. As Kerouac writes of Ginsberg and Cassady in On the Road, a novel that openly chronicles and fictionalizes their relationships: “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 . . . !” (8). Cassady, whom Ginsberg refers to in HOWL as the “Adonis of Denver,” was of particular personal and metaphoric interest for both him and Kerouac. Cassady’s swagger, restlessness, and insatiable sexual drive personified the energy of the archetypal West, and he became muse as much as friend.

Drug use abounded, since the Beats saw it as a tool for mind-expansion and the heightening of the senses, perceptions that could then be applied to creative work. Another venue of inspiration was the be-bop jazz scene in Harlem, the echoes of which can be heard in the twists and turns of their verse and prose rhythms. For a time Kerouac called his spontaneous style “blowing,” referring to a be-bop jazz player riffing off a melody with a horn.

The Beats increasingly took a holistic view of writing, questioning the validity of “high” art and rejecting the literary New Critical notion of “art for art’s sake”. Familiar with the literary canon through their studies at Columbia University, the group aimed to reclaim poetry from the ivory tower and place it squarely in jazz clubs, alleyways, and bedrooms. In this vein, their themes challenged the false sheen of American patriotism, a holdover from World War II’s war effort. The resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons, the onset of the cold war, and increasing racial tensions further contradicted America’s wholesome image. By exposing the disingenuous use of propaganda, they offered one of the strongest modern-day critiques of America as spiritually bereft and bloated by consumerism. The Beats lived their beliefs by existing hand-to-mouth and befriending criminals, prostitutes, and others who lived on the margins of society. Interestingly, through their immersion into the sordid parts of American life, Beat poetry emerged as largely affirmative of human nature. Throughout their work, the creative process is celebrated, as is the integrity of those who push societal boundaries, foster a spiritual vision, or choose to be different.

Characteristics of Beat poetry include what Cassady called “a continuous flow of undisciplined thought” (Watson 139). Spontaneity as a technique was valued, as was a probing and honest inventory of all of the senses. As Steven Watson writes of Kerouac, the Beats “tried to convey, uncensored, [their] field of perception at the moment of composition,” closing the gap between lived experience and the written word (138). Ginsberg, a master of spontaneity, took on the Beat approach later than his comrades, reflecting his ongoing formal studies at Columbia. Both Kerouac and Williams encouraged Ginsberg to let go of verse forms and develop a style of “word sketching.” Sharing characteristics with imagist poetry and his idol Whitman, Ginsberg began to pull details from his journals, arranging them in a catalogue style, as is most vividly experienced in Howl. Opening it with the line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked,” Ginsberg creates a mosaic of sharpened images from his experiences with the Beat circle and of his brilliant but troubled mother, Naomi.

In Corso’s “Bomb” (1958), published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s influential City Lights Books as a pullout centerfold in the shape of a mushroom cloud, the mosaic style is used to create a poem on the threat of nuclear war that is not polemic, but aesthetically spectacular. Through this technique, Corso’s poem aims to render the bomb insignificant by its own richness. Another technique of Corso’s is the interplay of voices within the poem. In “Marriage” (1959), Corso asks: “Should I get married? Should I be good?” He answers himself rhetorically by proposing to “astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood.” He proceeds to propose both conventional and unconventional means of courtship, generally leading toward the unconventional. Similarly, his prose poem, “Variations on a Generation” (1959), is a mock interview between the press and the Beat poets. By structuring his poems as an internal or external dialogue, Corso creates a tension between monolithic societal norms and the creativity of the individual mind.

In contrast to Ginsberg and Corso is the comparatively spare writing of Snyder, who is seen as the Beatnik Henry David Thoreau, just as Ginsberg is seen as the Beatnik Whitman. Feeling that symbol and metaphor serve as a distancing device, Synder crafts poems that offer a clear vision of the poet in nature. As the Beatnik most versed in Buddhism and environmentalism, he was the inspiration for Kerouac’s novel Dharma Bums (1958). And like Ginsberg, Snyder became an icon and activist in the 1960s and eventually a respected college professor.

Despite a largely progressive view on society, the Beat writers were largely antifeminist. With the exception of di Prima, very few women involved in the circle were not girlfriends or wives, and even girlfriends and wives were on the periphery of a sphere devoted to male bonding. Moreover, much of the writing conveyed an underlying misogyny that di Prima challenges in poems such as “The Practice of Magical Evolution” (1958), an ironic response to Snyder’s “Praise for Sick Women” (1957). In addition to being male, most members of the group were white, proving to be a limiting landscape for poet, playwright, and black activist Jones (Baraka). Although they had friendships with the core Beat group, di Prima and Jones evolved in directions that the other Beats did not, compelled by their own life experiences and political views. It is noteworthy that Jones and his former wife Hettie Cohen’s Totem Press published di Prima’s first poetry collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958). Through 1961–63, both di Prima and Jones edited the poetry newsletter, the Floating Bear. Other journals that were important for the Beats and helped them reach an audience were City Lights Books, Neurotica, Origin Press, Poets Press, Capra Press, and the Harvard Advocate .

A pivotal moment in Beat history was the meeting of East Coast and West Coast Beats during Ginsberg’s time in San Francisco. On October 13, 1955, Ginsberg, along with Snyder, McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia, organized a reading at Six Gallery. It is here that Ginsberg introduced the world to Howl and secured the opportunity to publish with Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. Thus began the San Francisco Renaissance, an important movement in modern American poetry.

Although the Beats began their association in 1943, it was not until after the Six Gallery reading that the group gained national prominence. Howl became inadvertently infamous due to a lawsuit over its 1956 publication. Publisher Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao were charged with obscenity but were defended broadly by the literary community. National attention was given to the trial, which eventually proved a victory for First Amendment rights, as Ferlinghetti and Murao were acquitted. During the year of the trial, Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) hit the bookstores, prompting both controversy and acclaim. Through these events, the Beats rapidly gained national recognition.

Ironically, as the idea of the “Beat generation” took root in the public imagination, spawning various fashion and music fads, the small circle to whom the term referred began to disperse. Ginsberg and Snyder became involved with the hippie movement; Kerouac became increasingly reclusive; Baraka became a lead artist within the Black Nationalist movement; di Prima focused on holistic medicines and cofounded The New Poets Theater; and Burroughs traveled to Tangiers after accidentally killing his wife and soon underwent his own censorship trial involving his novel Naked Lunch (1959).

Analysis of William S. Burroughs’s Novels

Some of the Beats burned so brightly and so intensely that they burned themselves out by middle age. Cassady died in Mexico from sun exposure and congestion shortly before his 42nd birthday. On October 1, 1969, less than a year after Cassady’s death, Kerouac died of an alcohol-related illness at the age of 46. In contrast, both Burroughs and Ginsberg died in 1997. Burroughs had delved ever deeper into his reclusive persona and paranoia, an active drug user until the end. Ginsberg, however, partook not only of the hippie movement of the 1960s, but he was celebrated by the punk movement in the 1970s and remained an active poet, Buddhist, and gay rights activist until the end, ultimately, as a world-renowned figure. The Beats endure, much as Ginsberg predicted in Howl, “with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their bodies good to eat a thousand years.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Charters, Ann. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Foster, Edward Halsey. Understanding the Beats. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1991. Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.

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The beat movement.

• Chuck Carlise
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.664
• Published online: 26 July 2017

The Beat movement was America's first major Cold War literary movement. Originally a small circle of unpublished friends, it later became one of the most significant sources of contemporary counterculture, and the most successful free speech movement in American literature. It is at once a reclamation of poetry from the modernist pedestal of the New Critics and an attempt to infiltrate the academy itself; as closely associated with the proliferation of Eastern spirituality in America as it is with the drug culture and jazz rhythms of the street.

The Beat movement is often identified by its three highest-profile writers: Jack Kerouac , Allen Ginsberg , and William Burroughs —three friends who met in New York City in the mid-1940s. However, the nucleus always included numerous influences and fellow writers, whose lives form the plot through which the Beat movement travels.

“A New Vision”: New York

A good starting point for understanding the significance of the Beat scene is to consider the context within which its members found their collective voice. The early 1940s was a relatively prosperous time for the United States. Having recovered from the Great Depression and high on World War II patriotic zeal, the country was in the early stages of learning the power of commodity capitalism while also developing the most destructive weapon in the history of the world. The seeds of communist paranoia were planted but still developing, and craftless, mechanized assembly line monotony would soon become the preferred method of production for everything from cars to homes.

It was beneath this shadow that, in 1943 , Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr , students at Columbia University, became friends. Ginsberg was a seventeen-year-old prelaw student who switched to English after studying with Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling . His father was a published lyric poet, and his mother, a radical communist and Russian émigré, had spent much of Allen's childhood slowly deteriorating into paranoid schizophrenia—a fact that compounded his own shaky sense of sanity in the years before he became open about his homosexuality. Carr was a charming transfer student from St. Louis, Missouri, who had been followed east by David Kammerer , a thirty-one-year-old friend who was romantically obsessed with him. The group came to include twenty-nine-year-old William Burroughs, a Harvard graduate with a sardonic wit and an infatuation with criminal life, all of which contributed to his status as an elder statesman in the circle. Soon they met Jack Kerouac, a twenty-one-year-old former football star and Columbia dropout who aspired to become a writer. Kerouac was a devout Catholic, the son of working class, French-Canadian parents. Sensitive, idealistic, and both shy and bursting with energy, he was already a mild alcoholic, and he would never completely dry out. Kerouac's girlfriend, Edie Parker , and her roommate, Joan Vollmer , also entered the picture, and a veritable salon was formed that conducted frenzied discussions on literature and politics and enjoyed an open sexual climate. Ginsberg and Carr declared their intention to create a “New Vision” for literature, and this “libertine” circle began collaborating on projects—reading their work to each other and generally supporting each other's literary aspirations—a practice they would continue long after their respective publications and fame. Marijuana and Benzedrine were commonly used by the circle, and before long, Burroughs had started using morphine and heroin. In his drug expeditions, Burroughs met Herbert Hunke , a Times Square hustler, who introduced them all to the real criminal life, as well as to the language of hip culture, including the term “beat” as a way of expressing the exhaustion of being down-and-out.

This group thrived until, in 1944 , after a night of drinking, Kammerer made a frighteningly desperate sexual advance, and Carr stabbed him to death with a Boy Scout knife. Kerouac and Burroughs were both arrested as accessories, for aiding Carr after the incident, and the group temporarily disintegrated: Carr was in a reformatory, Burroughs was at home in St. Louis, and Kerouac bargained a quick marriage for Edie Parker's family to bail him out of prison.

The group reassembled before long, however, and by 1946 , Neal Cassady , a friend of Hal Chase (Vollmer's roommate) had come from Colorado to visit. The appearance of Cassady, a twenty-year-old Denver con man and car thief with an endless supply of energy and irresistible sex appeal, altered the lives of Kerouac and Ginsberg forever. While in New York, Cassady had a short affair with Ginsberg and quickly became the first and great unrequited love of the poet's life, as well as a paradigm for sexuality (Burroughs and Hunke were also homosexual but were not nearly as attractive to Ginsberg as Cassady, who was bisexual). To Kerouac, Cassady embodied the explosive, spiritual energy he felt was so lacking in the age. Cassady asked Kerouac to teach him how to write before returning to the West. The two exchanged letters often, and Kerouac was deeply affected by the spontaneous energy of Cassady's prose. A fan of the improvisational bop jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis , Kerouac saw Cassady's huge monologues as verbal bop, and began developing a writing method based on this that he later outlined in The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose ( 1957 ), including the notion of first-thought best-thought , which would greatly influence Ginsberg.

Road Years: Beyond Columbia

Much of this nucleus was dispersing by the late 1940s. Kerouac, who had been in and out of the merchant marine during the war, spent 1946 to 1948 traveling the country with and without Cassady. He spent time in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, Mexico City, and other places, and occasionally stopped at his mother's house to work on what would become his first book, the autobiographical, Thomas Wolfe–inspired novel, The Town and the City , which was published in 1950 . These trips were eventually immortalized in his greatest work, On the Road .

Ginsberg, after having a hallucinated vision of William Blake and having gone through several failed romantic advances with Cassady, was arrested in 1949 for possession of Hunke's stolen property, stored at Ginsberg's apartment. Hunke went to prison, and Ginsberg was sent to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute.

While there, he met Carl Solomon , a fellow intellectual and publisher, who connected to Ginsberg profoundly at a pivotal moment in the young poet's life, and was ultimately the muse to whom Ginsberg dedicated his masterwork, Howl . In 1950 , out of the hospital, working a steady job, and even occasionally dating women in an attempt to “cure” his homosexuality, Ginsberg met twenty-year-old Gregory Corso , an idealistic “jail-kid” who was obsessed with the romantic poetry of Shelley and Rimbaud.

Meanwhile, Burroughs and Vollmer married and settled in Mexico City to cultivate their respective drug habits. One night in 1951 , while waiting in an apartment to sell a gun, someone suggested that Burroughs (an excellent marksman) demonstrate his William Tell act . Vollmer put a glass on her head, but Burroughs shot low. She was struck in the forehead and died quickly. Burroughs ultimately faced very few legal consequences but was haunted by the act for the rest of his life. He later, and famously, cited this as the beginning of his writing career, because it put him in touch with “the Ugly Spirit” that he believed possessed him at the time and thrust him into a lifelong struggle, from which he had to write his way out. Two years later, Junky was published under the pseudonym William Lee . Influenced by the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler , it is essentially a true confession of Burroughs's heroin addiction. Ace Paperbacks (owned by Solomon's uncle) published it as part of a two-volume set—the other volume being an antidrug tract by a former narcotics officer.

Kerouac, experiencing the most prolific writing time of his career, eventually moved to San Jose, California, with Cassady and his wife, Carolyn (a three-way affair later documented in Carolyn's memoir Off the Road ). Among the numerous projects he had completed by this time was On the Road , which was written in a twenty-day Benzedrine-induced frenzy on a single spool of typing paper. The book would remain unpublished for several years, rejected even by Ace. In 1954 , Ginsberg traveled to San Jose to join them. Spurned by Cassady, and not wanted around by Carolyn, he quickly found himself in the bustling cultural scene just to the north, in San Francisco.

Confluence: The San Francisco Renaissance

During these same years, another scene was emerging in the San Francisco area. Often considered an entirely different (if overlapping) movement by critics, as well as by some of the writers within each scene, the San Francisco Renaissance ultimately found its roots in the crossing of many spiritual, political, and literary influences.

Through the 1940s, small literary magazines like Circle and Ark had been publishing experimental and radical poetry and prose, producing manifesto-like mission statements and attracting the disillusioned youth of the West Coast. Then, in 1946 , Robert Duncan , a twenty-seven-year-old Oakland native, returned to Berkeley from New York, where he had known and helped publish Henry Miller , Anais Nin , and Kenneth Patchen . Bringing a surrealist sensibility with him, Duncan soon met twenty-one-year-old Jack Spicer , a fan of Federico Garcia Lorca, who believed in the inherent magic of poetry and relentlessly pushed spoken word readings around town. The two also became regulars at the lively anarchist literary meetings of Kenneth Rexroth . Rexroth was an established poet, slightly older (forty-five years old in 1950 ), a founder of the radical radio station KPFA, and a tireless anarchist who contributed greatly to the sense of San Francisco as a legitimate cultural center.

Also flourishing in this scene by the early 1950s were three friends who had moved down from Reed College in Portland, Oregon: Gary Snyder , Philip Whalen , and Lew Welch . Snyder, a serious outdoorsman and Zen Buddhist with an interest in Native American mythology, had studied linguistics and Asian culture—interests Rexroth shared. Whalen, too, studied Buddhism—he later was ordained a Buddhist monk—and occasionally worked as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains. Welch was a scholar of Gertrude Stein; he had greatly impressed William Carlos Williams with his dissertation on her. Welch suffered occasional nervous breakdowns and committed suicide in 1971 , but wrote with and influenced many of the San Francisco writers in this period.

It was into this scene that Allen Ginsberg stepped in 1954 , bearing a letter of introduction to Rexroth from Williams, a fellow native of Paterson, New Jersey, to whom Ginsberg often wrote for literary mentoring. (Some of Ginsberg's early letters were later published in Williams's postmodern masterpiece Paterson ). Intrigued by the scene and moved by many of the personalities within it, particularly Snyder, Ginsberg was soon joined by Kerouac. Not long after Kerouac's arrival, Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky , a model for the painter Robert La Vigne , who would become Ginsberg's lover and life partner.

Poetry readings were popular in San Francisco around this time, thanks to people like Spicer and Bob Kaufman , a jazz poet who had known Kerouac briefly while they were both in the merchant marine. Kaufman was known not to write his poems down; rather, he would enter a café or meeting hall and begin reciting from memory, or simply make them up as he went. (There is also some dispute as to whether “beatnik” was an improvised bop term of Kaufman's or whether the San Francisco Chronicle 's Herb Caen originated it as the degrading slang it became.) Along with presenting readings and selling radical magazines, City Lights bookstore, in North Beach, raised the literary consciousness of the city. Founded, and still owned by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti , a Sorbonne-educated veteran of World War II who saw Nagasaki just weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on it, City Lights was modeled after the great paperback bookshops of Paris, and catered to a decidedly pacifist revolutionary sensibility. Ferlinghetti also ran a small publishing house, City Lights Press, whose Pocket Poets series was intended to make poetry more accessible to the general public.

As literature became a more prominent part of the public consciousness in San Francisco, Rexroth decided to help showcase some of his younger poet friends. He asked Ginsberg to organize a reading, which Rexroth would host, at a converted garage on Fillmore Street, called the Six Gallery. On 7 October 1955 , Ginsberg, Snyder, and Whalen were joined by Phillip Lamantia and Michael McClure . Lamantia, a surrealist who had known Ginsberg in New York, read poems by his late friend John Hoffman . McClure, the youngest reader at only twenty-three, had never met Snyder or Whalen until the reading. A Kansas native with a keen interest in animism and natural science, he had entered the poetry scene after taking a workshop with Duncan. Kerouac had been asked to read, but declined, and instead took a collection for wine and sat on the edge of the low stage in the packed gallery. Ginsberg, the penultimate speaker, had been working frantically for two months on a visionary poem unlike any others he had written. He read the first completed section of the poem, “Howl,” in an incantatory and climactic rhythm, with Kerouac pounding on a wine jug, hollering “Go!” at each long-breath line. The reading left the astonished crowd of hipsters stunned, Rexroth in tears, and Ferlinghetti echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson 's famous declaration on seeing Walt Whitman 's first edition of Leaves of Grass : “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?”

Publication and Fame

The reading made them all instant local celebrities, particularly Ginsberg, who quickly set to work finishing the poem and gathering a collection for Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poets series—in which Howl and Other Poems would be number four. After this, things began to happen very quickly. A degree of notoriety had come to the San Francisco Renaissance, and the movement thrived for a short time, then dispersed. Gary Snyder was first to go, leaving for Japan, where he would spend most of the next ten years in a Zen monastery. Before leaving, he took Kerouac on a climb up Matterhorn Mountain in Yosemite, an adventure that resulted in a spiritual breakthrough for Kerouac, which he would document in The Dharma Bums , along with the reading itself. There was a going-away party for Snyder in 1956 , followed later in the year by the publication of Howl and Other Poems , which was seized by customs officials as obscene. Ferlinghetti was arrested for selling the book, and went to work amassing an army of intellectuals and critics to testify to its literary worth. Ginsberg, who had recently received news of his mother's death in a mental hospital, wanted little to do with the legal battle. He and Orlovsky left on an extended overseas vacation while the trial progressed. Ferlinghetti's defense overwhelmed the censors; the book was declared to have literary merit, and thus could not be considered obscene. The ramifications of this decision were tremendous; publishing houses such as Grove Press began dusting off works by such banned authors as Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence .

Another impact of the success of “Howl” was the sudden interest in Beat work. Beginning in 1955 , numerous novels and poetry collections by this circle of writers found their way into print, most notably Kerouac's On the Road in 1957 . It became a sensation among the disaffected youth, but was harshly reviewed by most critics, including Truman Capote 's famous declaration that the book was not writing but typing. The public was fascinated, though, and On the Road and Howl and Other Poems sold extremely well. By 1958 , Kerouac had added, among other titles, The Dharma Bums , which features Snyder as the main character. Snyder later published Riprap and the Cold Mountain Poems ( 1965 ). Also published in 1958 were Corso's nuclear ode, Bomb , and Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind , which, with Howl and Other Poems , is still one of the best-selling poetry books of all time.

Through all this, Burroughs had been living and writing in the Moroccan city of Tangier. He had a steady correspondence with Ginsberg and Kerouac, who visited him after the Six Gallery reading. What they found Burroughs developing was a writing style he called “routines.” Burroughs would start with an image—often something from a dream or begun while extremely high—and begin typing, improvising on it for as long as he could, not unlike the jazzy spontaneous prose Kerouac preached. The difference was that when he came to a block, Burroughs simply stopped and began later on a different image. When Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso visited Burroughs, in Tangier and later at the famous “Beat Hotel” in Paris, they found uncountable routines scattered around his dingy apartment, and each attempted to help Burroughs gather, retype, and structure them into a text that Kerouac had dubbed “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs's work was raw and often even more graphic than Ginsberg's, making it virtually unprintable in most countries. Ginsberg was a relentless promoter of his friend's work, however, and gathered some of the less outrageous routines to send to publishers back home.

In March 1958 , Robert Creeley published several poems by Beat writers, including routines by Burroughs, in the Black Mountain Review , and soon after, Irving Rosenthal printed more in the Chicago Review . A conservative outcry followed, and when Rosenthal was instructed not to print Burroughs's work in the next issue, he resigned to found Big Table magazine. By the middle of 1959 , Big Table I had been seized by U.S. postal authorities. Apparently influenced by the decision at the “Howl” trial, a judge ruled that the Burroughs routines were not obscene. The scandal surrounding the book prompted a French publisher to ask Burroughs for a full manuscript, and by August, Naked Lunch was in print.

Ripples and Repercussions

While many of the early Beat texts received harsh reviews by academic publications, such as the Partisan Review , there were those who recognized their significance. In 1960 , Donald Allen 's The New American Poetry appeared. Allen divided the era's poets into several categories, splitting many of these friends into separate subgroups. Kerouac and Ginsberg were listed as “Beats,” and Ferlinghetti and Welch as “San Francisco Renaissance,” while Snyder and Whalen were in a third, unclassified section.

Besides gathering these writers into one literary anthology (the Black Mountain poets and New York school were also represented), this volume continued to widen the conception of what “Beat” meant to the rest of the actual generation. Many talented writers across the country, living in unconnected bohemian pockets, were gradually becoming aware that they were not alone. Writing in New York, Diane DiPrima and LeRoi Jones were two of the most talented and tenacious of these writers—founding the literary magazine Floating Bear and publishing it on a mimeograph machine through the early 1960s. Jones and his wife, Hettie, also ran Yugen , an experimental magazine, for several years, but it was Floating Bear 's cheaper and more immediate format that allowed for a crossing of styles and, as another publisher pointed out, gave the writers freedom to fail. Floating Bear 9 was eventually seized on obscenity charges, but Jones and DiPrima were never indicted. Many small literary magazines operated at this time, publishing experimental work for eager audiences, notably including Ed Sanders's Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts .

Jones, DiPrima, and Sanders were among the more talented young Beat writers to emerge in the wake of “Howl” and On the Road , along with Ted Joans , John Wieners , Ray Bremser , and Brenda Frazer . Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka ) published the excellent Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note in 1961 , and was included in Allen's New American Poetry . His poetry references Kerouac, Snyder, and Ginsberg at times, and draws connections between the early 1960s black American experience and the Beat Generation, in that both represent a generally unwanted, but still distinctly present, sector of American life. DiPrima, a strong female voice in a movement often considered exclusively male, ultimately made her mark through her intensely honest and often uncensored poetry and prose. Her meditation on an early abortion, “Brass Furnace Going Out,” and other poems, such as “Poetics,” prefigure a feminist voice in American poetics by several years, and her love poems, such as Three Laments and Song for Baby-O, Unborn , are among the stronger jazz poetry of the era. Sanders helped begin a transition to political activism. He wrote his first published poem, Poem from Jail , while he was in jail following his arrest at an early protest for peace.

The original wave of writers continued to disperse, however. Snyder and the poet JoAnne Kyger were married in Tokyo in 1960 , and both continued writing while abroad. Michael McClure received much attention for his play The Beard , which was both critically acclaimed and challenged as obscene in 1965 . Kerouac moved to a cabin in Big Sur, California, owned by Ferlinghetti, in an attempt to cure his alcoholism. The result was disastrous: the solitude and sublimity of the seaside cabin tested his resolve daily, and ultimately sent him into a mental and emotional downward spiral from which he never recovered. His book Big Sur ( 1962 ) documents the experience and is, in many ways, his last truly honest writing. Meanwhile, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso spent the summer of 1961 in Tangier, taking part in Timothy Leary 's early LSD experiments, later dubbed Psychedelic Summer . Ginsberg also published his tribute to his mother, Kaddish , in 1961– a poem many critics, and Ginsberg himself, believed to be his finest work. He would later travel in Asia with Snyder and Kyger, experiencing a spiritual awakening along the way. Kyger would document this trip in Strange Big Moon: Japan and India Journals , 1960–1964 . In Paris, Burroughs had connected with the painter Brion Gysin , and the two had begun collaborating on a method of writing that included cutting previously written texts and rearranging them at random. Burroughs would devote the next decade to perfecting this “cut-up” method.

Whose Generation?: Cultural Significance

The Beat movement was unique in that it directly affected the popular culture of the time—a fact even more significant when one considers how ostracized these writers were by the contemporary literati. Given that odd balance, the question remains of what pulse the Beats were able to tap into that had been so neglected before.

In 1948 , Kerouac and an aspiring writer, John Clellon Holmes , sat in Holmes's New York apartment discussing their generation. Kerouac characterized the postwar youth as a generation of furtives, not simply knowing, but having grown accustomed to living with, the nuclear threat. In the face of such constant, dull fear, the only sense of meaning they were given for their lives was in the form of Cold War propaganda, and the meaninglessness of their soon-to-be-inherited corporate-cog futures. Holmes noted Kerouac's comment, that the entire generation was beat, as the first use of the term “Beat Generation.” In 1952 , Holmes published a famous article in The New York Times , “This Is the Beat Generation.” In it, he expands on these ideas, differentiating between the Lost Generation of the 1920s and his own, calling attention not simply to the current youths' sense of being used, but also to an objectless sense of loss that manifested itself in a desperate search for something to believe in. The Beat Generation, then, as Kerouac often noted, was as much about spirituality as it was about restlessness and rebellion. Kerouac would later insist that “beat” referred to street authenticity, exhaustion of the down-and-out, the rhythms of both the heart and the speaker, and ultimately to the beatitudes, which speak directly to the powerless masses.

When On the Road became a sensation five years later, it was due in part to Kerouac's mad exuberance and unorthodox improvisational writing style, but also to his ability to embody the frenetic desperation Holmes had written about. Sal Paradise (Kerouac's alter ego in the book) was the soul of the generation, constantly searching and celebrating, declaring that “the only ones for me are the mad ones,” and seeing holiness in nearly everyone he met. Dean Moriarty (Cassady) was the ideal—the urban cowboy living by his own rules, never stopping long enough to acknowledge that anything could go wrong. Snyder noted years later that the nerve Cassady touched in the New York Beats was in some way connected to the spirit of the old West, the American dream that had been pushed westward a century before. The expansiveness, possibility, and constant, unself-conscious motion Cassady embodied were irresistible in that they were utterly opposed to the deliberate Old World paranoia of the time. In that sense, the Beat tie to San Francisco is much more of an organic expansion than an arbitrary lumping of separate literary movements. To take the search for meaning and belief to its ultimate ends by continuing westward across the Pacific, the introduction of Buddhism, particularly Snyder's celebratory Zen practice, touched that same nerve. Kerouac's blending of Buddhism with his Catholic traditions is also truly a Beat phenomenon—the search for new meaning without erasing one's existing sense of individual self. In addition, the common study and discussion of these things among friends truly dictates the other half of the Beat aesthetic—the search for connection to another person. It is ultimately the same impulse that compelled Kerouac to write his strongest work about his friends (Cassady and Snyder), and the resolution that Ginsberg provides at the end of “Howl,” whose redemptive closing image is a dream of Carl Solomon tearfully arriving at Ginsberg's door in Berkeley.

These same pressures that brought the original Columbia scene together in the mid-1940s affected and catalyzed many of the other arts being produced at this time. The influence of bop jazz on the Beat writers is well documented, particularly in Kerouac's vignette “Jazz of the Beat Generation.” The intensely emotional and unscripted solos of Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk , Dizzy Gillespie , and Lester Young , and later Miles Davis and John Coltrane , surely were pivotal in Kerouac and Ginsberg's literary development; but more important, these musicians were ultimately after the same things as their literary progeny. The intense jams were diametrically opposed to the acceptable sense of 1940s and 1950s decorum and uniformity, and therefore much closer to real . This same sense of abandon drove Jackson Pollock 's chaotically revolutionary 1940s work; his large canvases splattered with paint seem to have an organic motion to them. Pollock, a raging alcoholic like Kerouac, did not believe that he was getting closer to nature, but rather that he was nature, when painting that way. In Hollywood—arguably the most potentially bourgeois, moneymaking sector of the arts—Marlon Brando's stunning Method acting, in films such as A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront , and The Wild One , also speak to this search. Brando's ability to give himself over to the role and improvise action and emotion were essentially the silver screen version of this same spontaneous abandon. This would come to a head in James Dean 's 1955 classic Rebel without a Cause —almost the entire film is ad-libbed, with very little direction and no script. Even in stand-up comedy, exuberance and energy found their way to the fringes with new performers like Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce . Buckley's performances were extremely energetic and utterly unique, while Bruce specialized in pushing the envelope, to the point of often being harassed for obscenity.

The one major missing link in the Beat literary movement is in the lack of attention given to women writers of the period. When asked about this, Gregory Corso asserted that there were many brilliant women rebelling within this scene, but that this led to family-imposed institutionalization for many of them. Nonetheless, there are several striking female writers, poets, and publishers who emerged from this movement. Diane DiPrima is usually the first to be mentioned, and perhaps the strongest voice, but poets such as Kyger, Elise Cowen , and Lenore Kandel are more recently receiving deserved critical attention. Kandel's erotic love poems, as well as her manifesto Poetry Is Never Compromise , are as powerful and indicative of the Beat aesthetic as any writing of this period, and the uncollected poetry of Cowen, who committed suicide in 1962 , is striking and original. Hettie Jones and Joyce Johnson (née Glassman ) have both enjoyed successful careers as writers and editors. Jones's memoir How I Became Hettie Jones ( 1990 ) and Johnson's Minor Characters ( 1983 ) operate as both strong autobiographies and statements on women in the Beat Generation.

Latter-Day Beats and Later Work

Beat influence was enormous on the next generation's counterculture, whose dominant issues centered on the Vietnam War, civil rights, and legalization of drugs such as the new LSD. Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest , had begun a traveling bohemian circle around his own LSD experiments, and recruited the ageless Cassady to drive their bus. Ginsberg would later become involved with this scene as well. Highly influenced by their own conceptions of On the Road and The Dharma Bums , this circle, dubbed “the Merry Pranksters,” would later define the bohemian, hippie aesthetic. The New Left also reflected the protest sensibility of writers like Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg—who also involved himself in this scene, supporting or actively participating in nearly every major counterculture event of the 1960s, including the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where he helped organize protests with Black Panther and Yippie leaders. Burroughs covered the convention for Esquire , teamed with the French avant-garde playwright Jean Genet and the coauthor of Easy Rider , Terry Southern . The previous year, Ginsberg, Snyder, and McClure had been leaders at the San Francisco Be-In; Snyder blew the conch shell to inaugurate the event.

The strongest young voice of this new protest generation, Bob Dylan , was profoundly influenced by the Beats, and became a close friend of Ginsberg during the 1970s. Meanwhile, Burroughs's cut-ups, strange sci-fi scenarios, and heroin awareness were hugely influential in the new proto-punk scene emerging in New York under the wing of Andy Warhol , and on musicians like Lou Reed and David Bowie . The energy of Kerouac's writing can also be seen in the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson , and in the later jazzy readings of Tom Waits .

By the end of the 1960s, Cassady and Kerouac had died, after too many years of hard living. Already hugely important in pop culture by this time, Kerouac died without seeing real critical support for his writing. Other Beats were more fortunate. The 1970s saw Ginsberg receiving the National Book Award for The Fall of America in 1974 , and Snyder the Pulitzer Prize for his Turtle Island collection in 1975 . In 1976 , Ginsberg and the poet Anne Waldman were asked to found a writing school at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado—the first accredited Buddhist college in the western hemisphere. They named the program the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and it quickly became a stopping point for most remaining bohemian writers to lecture and read.

In the early 1990s, a resurgence of interest in Beat literature began at universities, along with conferences and academic journals on or influenced by their work. In addition, outside the academy, Beat-influenced poetry slams and readings increased in number across the country. Many retrospectives and long-term projects by Beat writers were produced, including collected works and recordings of many Beat writers, among them Kerouac and Ginsberg, Snyder's book-length, forty-year project Mountains and Rivers without End ( 1996 ), and a marathon reading of On the Road on the fortieth anniversary of its publication. By the time of Ginsberg's and Burroughs's deaths in 1997 , university courses on the Beats were becoming common, and in 1998 , Ferlinghetti was named poet laureate of San Francisco. Later that year, the Modern Library placed On the Road at number 55 on its “Top 100 English Language Novels of the 20th Century .”

See also Burroughs, William S. ; Ginsberg, Allen ; Kerouac, Jack, and his On the Road ; and Snyder, Gary .

Further Reading

• Allen, Donald M. , ed. The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 . New York, 1960. Among the first texts to acknowledge Beat as a significant literary movement. Also draws distinctions between Beat, San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, New York school, and other movements.
• Ball, Gordon , ed. Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness . New York, 1974. Ginsberg essays on other Beat writers, happenings.
• Bartlett, Lee , ed. The Beats: Essays in Criticism . Jefferson, N. C., 1981. Critical work on all the major Beat writers.
• Breslin, James E. B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 . Chicago, 1984. Some discussion of Beat texts, including a long essay on Howl .
• Charters, Ann , ed. The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America . Detroit, 1983. Many excellent essays on almost every figure in this movement, by their biographers, fans, and sometimes by one another. A very good biographical perspective.
• Charters, Ann . The Portable Beat Reader . New York, 1992. Selections by many key figures in the Beat movement, along with Charters's editorial and biographical commentary. An excellent starting point in the study of the Beat movement.
• Davidson, Michael . The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century . New York, 1989. Analysis of historical context, as well as the writings that came out of this literary scene.
• George-Warren, Holly , ed. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats . New York, 1999. Cultural and biographical essays and retrospectives.
• Gifford, Barry , and Lawrence Lee . Jack's Book . New York, 1979. Oral history of Kerouac's life.
• Ginsberg, Allen . Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and Variant Versions . Edited by Barry Miles . New York, 1986. Interesting background and compositional history of the poem.
• Goodman, Michael Barry . Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs ' Naked Lunch. Metuchen, N.J., 1981. Complete background of the seminal obscenity trial.
• Hickey, Morgen . The Bohemian Register: An Annotated Bibliography of the Beat Literary Movement . Metuchen, N.J., 1990. Good listing of primary and secondary sources.
• Holmes, John Clellon . Passionate Opinions . Fayetteville, Ark., 1988. Many of Holmes's definitive essays on the Beat Generation, with his later commentary as well.
• Johnson, Joyce . Minor Characters . Boston, 1983. Memoir by Kerouac's former girlfriend. First definitive statement on women in the Beat Generation.
• Knight, Brenda , ed. Women of the Beat Generation . Berkeley, Calif., 1996. Very good collection of writings on and by Beat women.
• McClure, Michael . Scratching the Beat Surface . San Francisco, 1982. Firsthand account of Six Gallery reading, among other things.
• Morgan, Ted . Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs . New York, 1988. Very good biography, including much information on Burroughs's Tangier and Paris years not often noted in other sources on the Beats.
• Rexroth, Kenneth . American Poetry in the Twentieth Century . New York, 1971. Evaluation of how Beat writers affected development of American poetics.
• Tonkinson, Carole , ed. Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation . New York, 1995. Excerpts from many Beat writers on or inspired by Buddhist thought, along with biographical and critical commentary on the subject.
• Waldman, Anne , ed. The Beat Book: Poems and Fiction of the Beat Generation . Boston, 1996. Selections from many Beat writers, including previously excluded women, such as Kyger and Kandel.

Related Articles

• Burroughs, William S.
• Ginsberg, Allen
• Snyder, Gary

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Write the Beats: A Workshop of Beat Poetry Prompts

Beat era poets have had a profound influence on modern culture and mores as well as contemporary poetics—in particular performance poetry. In this class we will use prompts based on poem by prominent beat era poets such as Ginsberg, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Diprima, Kaufman and Kerouac. Prompts will explore themes of political poetry/identity environmentalism, feminist poetry, surrealism, and spontaneous bop prosody. We will also look at works by Baraka, Waldman, and Corso for the poetry of rebellion, beat spirituality and neo romanticism. At the completion of the course, poets will have an anthology of their own beat genre poems. ‍

This class takes place remotely online via Zoom. Register to receive the zoom link and class instructions.

Work with the best...

Ray McNiece is the author of nine books of poems and monologues, most recently Love Song for Cleveland, a collaboration with photographer Tim Lachina and Breath Burns Away, New Haiku. He toured Russia with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and he toured Italy twice with legendary beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He fronts the blues rock band, Tongue-in-Groove.

This class takes place remotely online via Zoom

Based in cleveland, oh 44113, related classes.

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4 Defining Beat Poets to Add to Your Reading List

Beat poetry stands out as one of the most influential and widely referenced poetry movements today. If you’ve heard of Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac—spontaneous and spiritual writers who subverted the genre’s conventions throughout their lifetimes—then you’ve heard of beat poetry, a literary school that continues to have a deeply felt impact on the genre. 

Beat poets not only believed in creating political change and challenging societal norms through their poetry, but they embraced “exploding” these standards altogether, as Ginsberg described. This radical poetry grew out of social unrest and protest, as well as placed a strong emphasis on both music and nature. Above all, the beat poets celebrated authentic poetry, favoring frenzied, spur-of-the-moment thoughts over-analytical writing and careful revision, an approach that can still be seen in 21st century spoken word performances and Instagram poetry. These four famed beat poets represent this iconic literary perspective.

1. Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg is best known for his long-form poem “Howl” hailed as a revolutionary poem and a searing social critique. This sprawling work creates chaotic yet powerful imagery out of Ginsberg’s anger, as he depicts scenes from what he sees as a selfish, materialistic, and corrupt society he must push back against. In many ways, “Howl” is a creative take on the elegy—a form that Ginsberg also channels in his well-known poem “Kaddish” —as Ginsberg mourns the “best minds of [his] generation” and details the horrors they faced. 

“Poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, / who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,” Ginsberg writes, illustrating the psychedelic and often surrealist style of the beat poets. 

“Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, / who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, / who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to Terror through the wall.”

2. Jack Kerouac

As both a poet and a fiction writer, Jack Kerouac wrote award-winning novels like On the Road and The Town and the City . The observant, confessional style seen in these books can also be felt in Kerouac’s short but poignant poems, including “The bottoms of my shoes.” Like many other beat poets, Kerouac didn’t rely on grand inspiration, instead choosing to write scenes and images from his everyday life. He called this style “spontaneous prose,” a hurried, unedited technique that he believed allowed the subconscious mind to fully emerge in writing.

“The bottom of my shoes / are clean / From walking in the rain,” Kerouac illustrates simply in “The bottoms of my shoes,” a poem from his revered haiku collection .

3. Diane di Prima

An author of more than 40 books and former San Francisco Poet Laureate, Diane di Prima explored themes like spirituality, motherhood, and activism. Di Prima especially prioritized taking risks in her poetry, an approach she embodied up until she passed away in late 2020. “Buddhist New Year Song” —which ponders otherworldliness, time travel, and reincarnation—captures di Parma’s wild voice and love for taking unexpected leaps within her poetry. 

“You said / ‘There are stars in your hair ‘—it was truth I / brought down with me / to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden / make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature, /  and it is truth, that we came here, I told you, / from other planets / where we were lords, we were sent here, / for some purpose,” di Parma writes. 

“The golden mask I had seen before, that fitted / so beautifully over your face, did not return / nor did that face of a bull you had acquired / amid northern peoples, nomads, the Gobi desert / . . . the sky itself a tangled tapestry, glowing / but almost, I could see the planet from which we had come.”

4. Joanne Kyger

Joanne Kyger wrote more than 20 poetry collections, inspired by politics, travel, and her Zen Buddhism practice. Kyger believed in letting breath rule poetry, rather than structure or syntax, an approach that makes her poems seem deeply felt and meditative. Kyger was also known for setting an overarching, observable mood in her poetry, one that readers can pick up on in her poem “It’s been a long time,” a work that attempts to record a revolution and push for unity.

“During the beat of this story you may find other beats. I mean / a beat, I mean Cantus, I mean Firm us, I mean paper, I mean in / the Kingdom which is coming, which is here in discovery,” Kyger writes, exemplifying her talent for building tone and anticipation. “. . . You don’t go across my vibes, / but with them, losing the pronoun. It is Thy, it is Thee, / it is I, it is me.”

Wanting to learn about other poetic schools and movements? Check out our round-up of New York School writers .

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Musicality of Poems

Poems have a musicality to them. They are meant to be read aloud to hear the sound, the rhythm, and sometimes the rhyme. How do poets create sound and rhythm in their poems? Through several literary devices.

Assonance 

Assonance is the repetition of the same vowel sound in words near each other.

Consonance 

Consonance is the repetition of the same consonant sounds in words near each other

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sounds at the beginning of words near each other.

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia means a word resembles the meaning sound it represents.

Rhyme requires two or more words that repeat the same sounds.. They are often spelled in a similar way, but they don’t have to be spelled in similar ways. Rhyme can occur at the end of a line, called end rhyme, or it can occur in the middle of the line, called internal rhyme.

Rhythm, of course, is the beat–the stressed syllables in a poem. Poets have a variety of possibilities for building that rhythm and ending lines.

Meter is the countable beat that a poet or reader can count. The rhythm will have equal intervals. Count the beat in William Blake’s poem “The Lamb.”

The Lamb Author : William Blake ©1789

Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life & bid thee feed By the stream & o’er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, wooly, bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice? Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee, Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee: He is callèd by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb. He is meek, & he is mild; He became a little child. I a child, & thou a lamb, We are callèd by his name. Little Lamb, God bless thee! Little Lamb, God bless thee!

Also, look for alliteration, assonance, consonance, and end-rhyme.

Caesuras are a break, pause, or interruption in the line.

End-Stopped Line

An end-stopped line occurs like natural speech; it ends at the end of a line.

Enjambment 

Enjambment, the opposite of the end-stopped line, does not pause at the end of a line. It continues on without a pause into the next line. For example, poets may break between the subject and a verb, an article and a noun, or between a helping verb and an action verb. In the poem “Endymion,” John Keats uses enjambment. Read this excerpt–the first five lines:

Endymion Author : John Keats ©1817

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Introduction to Creative Writing by Lumen Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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