The Beat Generation, Authors, and Their Works

Allen Ginsberg, a beat poet, is an extremely influential and accomplished poet. His poem, “A Supermarket in California,” is an amazing poem. It details themes of loneliness, consumerism, and the search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. With that in mind, The Beat Generation explored these types of themes in the confines of modern society. In this post, we will explore the history of this movement. And, we will examine the authors and the works that continue to inspire future poets.

History of the Beat Generation

These revolutionary pre-baby boomers grew up in the 1940s-1950s when there existed a romantic view of suburbia in America post-WWII. As such, it was in these halls of capitalist complacency, that the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder emerged. Kerouac himself came up with the term “Beat Generation,” which addressed the beat down and disenfranchised with the system.

Furthermore, the home of this movement was in the prestigious schools out west (San Francisco). Here the most prominent writers could get published in journals and rebel against the intellectualism of the Enlightenment. These authors included William S. Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. In fact, Kerouac himself coined the term “Beat,” which references both the beaten down spirit and the beatific enlightenment of spiritual reconnection.

The beat poets searched for myriad freedoms within their lives. They pushed against the constraints of capitalism, whether that be through spiritualism, sexuality, drugs, or other avenues of expression.

Major Themes and Authors

The authors from the Beat Generation focused on transgressive themes of the time. For instance, Ginsberg included homosexual musings in his poetry, and Kerouac included references to drugs and nature itself. in his novel On the Road. Burroughs, meanwhile, wrote about addiction in Naked Lunch. Other writers of this generation included references to Zen Buddhism and the culture of the Native Americans, as it reflected their perception of the natural world.

Similarly, and as sources state, Kerouac and Ginsberg had inspiration from the Romantic movement. They discussed “the New Vision,” which came from William Butler Yates, and they spent time refining their artistic purposes. The New Vision and indigenous culture helped inspire their free-form poetry and their minimalist writings.

The Beat Generation rejected traditional literary Formalism, embracing spontaneous prose and free verse to capture raw human experience. With poems like “Howl,” which saw a censorship trial, the Beat Generation advanced a more honest and evolved view of the United States that had been highly romanticized.