Ginsberg &The Beats
1950s
Beat Writers
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Group of avant-garde writers in the U.S. in the mid-1950’s
Term “beat” coined by Jack Kerouac in 1948:
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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
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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,
1956
First Edition Cover,
1957
First Edition Cover,
1959
Beats Rebelled Against…
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Movement follows
discovery of mass
atrocity, concentration
camps at end of WWII
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Beats distrusted
American “virtues” of
progress and power after
dropping of the atomic
bomb
Atomic Bomb
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Los Alamos a metaphor
for spiritual emptiness of
modern rationality
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Many scientists contribute
small parts to creation of
doomsday device
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Loss of morality
Middle-Class Life
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Beats saw 1950’s
middle-class life as
sterile and conformist
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Levittown, NY
1940’s-1950’s
Rise of the suburbs
Madison Avenue
The “corporation man”
McCarthyism
Instead, offered “beatness”
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Ginsberg defines
beatness as “looking
at society from the
underside, beyond
society’s conceptions
of good and evil.”
Beatness, cont.
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Personal salvation
through heightened
awareness (however
obtained-drugs, sex,
etc.)
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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)
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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
Poetry Reading,
San Francisco State University, 1955
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U.S. Customs and S.F.
police seized the book and
banned its sale when first
published
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However, deemed to have
some “redeeming social
merit” and released for
sale (Oct. 1957)
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One of the best-selling
volumes of American
poetry of all time
Form in Howl
Form attempts to be spontaneous,
improvisational (like Jazz music)
n  Influenced by the long, free-flowing
monologues of Neal Cassady
n  Whitman-like long line; initial repetition
n  Ginsberg based line length on breath (as
much as could be said in one breath)
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Reading Howl: Part I
Honors the fallen; people Ginsberg
knew--”the best minds” of his generation.
n  Biographical facts in this section.
References to Neal Cassady (the “muse”
for Ginsberg and the beats), William S.
Burroughs, Kerouac, etc.
n  http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/
poems/howl.txt
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Reading Howl: Part II
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Names the enemy: Moloch
Stands for soul-lessness of 1950’s American
institutions--the military-industrial complex
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Armies
Jails
Government
Factories
Banks
The Rational Mind itself (line 85)
http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/
howl.txt
Reading Howl: Part III
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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”)