Ginsberg &The Beats1950s

Beat Writers

• Group of avant-garde writers in the U.S. in the mid-1950’s• Term “beat” coined by Jack Kerouac in 1948:

– Down and out– Beatific

• Continued literary bohemianism of the Lost Generation writers of the 1920s, but lived in America, rejected European literary traditions and models.

City Lights Bookstore

• Kerouac and Ginsberg move from NYC to west coast in mid-fifties

• Meet group of young poets in the San Francisco area (Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc.)

• Poetry readings, gatherings at City Lights bookstore

Major Early Works

First Edition Cover,1957

First Edition Cover,1956

First Edition Cover,1959

Beats Rebelled Against…

• Movement follows discovery of mass atrocity, concentration camps at end of WWII

• Beats distrusted American “virtues” of progress and power after dropping of the atomic bomb

Atomic Bomb

• Los Alamos a metaphor for spiritual emptiness of modern rationality

• Many scientists contribute small parts to creation of doomsday device

• Loss of morality

Middle-Class Life

• Beats saw 1950’s middle-class life as sterile and conformist– Rise of the suburbs– Madison Avenue– The “corporation man”– McCarthyism

Levittown, NY1940’s-1950’s

Instead, offered “beatness”

• Ginsberg defines beatness as “looking at society from the underside, beyond society’s conceptions of good and evil.”

Beatness, cont.• Personal salvation

through heightened awareness (however obtained-drugs, sex, etc.)

• Pursuit of “total experience” by disrupting social taboos

“who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls” (lines 10-11)

• In many ways, carried forward traditional American literary projects of individualism and Transcendentalism.

• Believed in a transcending spirituality that no human “systems” could dissolve

Howl

• U.S. Customs and S.F. police seized the book and banned its sale when first published

• However, deemed to have some “redeeming social merit” and released for sale (Oct. 1957)

• One of the best-selling volumes of American poetry of all time

Poetry Reading, San Francisco State University, 1955

Form in Howl

• Form attempts to be spontaneous, improvisational (like Jazz music)

• Influenced by the long, free-flowing monologues of Neal Cassady

• Whitman-like long line; initial repetition• Ginsberg based line length on breath (as much

as could be said in one breath)

Reading Howl: Part I

• Honors the fallen; people Ginsberg knew--”the best minds” of his generation.

• Biographical facts in this section. References to Neal Cassady (the “muse” for Ginsberg and the beats), William S. Burroughs, Kerouac, etc.

• http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt

Reading Howl: Part II

• Names the enemy: Moloch• Stands for soul-lessness of 1950’s American

institutions--the military-industrial complex– Armies– Jails– Government– Factories– Banks– The Rational Mind itself (line 85)

• http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt

Reading Howl: Part III

• Dedicated to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg meant in Columbia Psychiatric Institute (“Rockland” in the poem) in 1949

• Evokes his mother’s own mental illness and subsequent lobotomy

• In a society that seems crazy, how do we judge who is mad?

• Whitman-esque footnote, but even more explicit, shocking than Whitman?

• http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt

“Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole

holy! Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy!

everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel! The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you

my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the

hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac

holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!

Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!” (From “Footnote to Howl”)