"So I guess you might say we're a beat generation..."
-Jack Kerouac
The Beat Poetry Movement, or the Beat Generation, was an American social and literary movement originating in the 1950s and centered in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco.
This movement closely followed the end of World War II, which left Beat Poets such as Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti questioning mainstream politics and culture. They rejected the materialism, militarism, consumerism, and conformity of their time for individual freedom and spontaneity instead. They went as far as to express their estrangement from conventional society through nonconformist styles of dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary.
The Beats wanted to free poetry from academic rigidity and bring it back “to the streets” where it first started. Many Beat poems are experimental in nature and contain a free verse stream-of-consciousness and frequent use of profanity, which was supposed to reflect the spontaneity and stark truthfulness they sought to return to society. It reflects not only the Beats’ withdrawal from conventional society, but also their protest of it.
This movement closely followed the end of World War II, which left Beat Poets such as Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti questioning mainstream politics and culture. They rejected the materialism, militarism, consumerism, and conformity of their time for individual freedom and spontaneity instead. They went as far as to express their estrangement from conventional society through nonconformist styles of dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary.
The Beats wanted to free poetry from academic rigidity and bring it back “to the streets” where it first started. Many Beat poems are experimental in nature and contain a free verse stream-of-consciousness and frequent use of profanity, which was supposed to reflect the spontaneity and stark truthfulness they sought to return to society. It reflects not only the Beats’ withdrawal from conventional society, but also their protest of it.
"The point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where
you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way, which is the old
classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul."
-Allen Ginsberg
you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way, which is the old
classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul."
-Allen Ginsberg
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