Following the end of the war, the United States and the Soviet Union quickly entered a Cold War, a period of geopolitical hostility that created paranoia and cultural and political repression at home.īy the mid-1950s, the Beats helped to spearhead a cultural vanguard reacting against institutionalized American values, materialism, and conformity. In his article “Driving the Beat Road,” Jeff Weiss explains, “More than a half-century after their emergence, the Beats still offer up wild style, a sense of freedom and wonder for the natural world almost unrivaled in postwar literature.”īeat poetry emerged from the disillusionment that followed World War II, a period of unimaginable atrocities including the Holocaust and the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. They took inspiration from jazz musicians, surrealists, metaphysical poets, visionary poets such as William Blake, and haiku and Zen poetry.
Poetically experimental and politically dissident, the Beat poets expanded their consciousnesses through explorations of hallucinogenic drugs, sexual freedom, Eastern religion, and the natural world. “First thought, best thought” was how central Beat poet Allen Ginsberg described their method of spontaneous writing. By the 1950s, poets at the heart of the movement had settled in the Bay Area, especially in neighborhoods near Beat poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights.īeat poets sought to write in an authentic, unfettered style.
At first, they organized in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They became known as the Beat Poets––a name that evokes weariness, down-and-outness, the beat under a piece of music, and beatific spirituality. In the 1940s and 50s, a new generation of poets rebelled against the conventions of mainstream American life and writing.
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