Beat Poetry

The Beat Generation was what many people now consider to be one of the first major subcultures or countercultural movements in America. While a number of individuals were members of this movement, the main three writers who produced literary works were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. Since Kerouac and Burroughs were best remembered as novelists, Allen Ginsberg and his work was largely representational of Beat poetry.

Allen Ginsberg launched Beat poetry into national attention with his groundbreaking work, Howl. Published in 1956, Howl was the culmination of Ginsberg and the rest of the Beat Generation's foray into an unconventional lifestyle of freedom and hedonism. Ginsberg and his pals rejected the mainstream culture of the fifties, instead advocating the use of drugs, homosexuality, and leading experimental lifestyles. Howl was the story of the Beat culture, expressing in form-free poetry the views of this subculture, often graphically. Because of its graphic depiction of drugs and sex, the poem and its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were challenged in court for obscenity. However, a 1957 ruling deemed Howl, and thus Beat poetry in general, to be of literary importance, thus setting a precedent for freedom of speech and artistic creativity.

Divided into three parts, Howl sympathizes with jazz music and musicians, artists, mental patients, spirituality and drugs use while rejecting industrialized civilization. While Allen Ginsberg was influenced by many works and writers, perhaps Walt Whitman is the most prominent. Comparisons are drawn not only in terms of sexual identity, as Ginsberg was a homosexual and Whitman is suspected of being so, but also in terms of line structure. Lines in Howl are meant to be read in one long breath, as was the case with much of Whitman's poetry. For fundamentally changing poetry's style, Ginsberg today is known as one of the most famous poets.

Besides Howl, other poetry by Beat artists exists, like Pull My Daisy, a collaborative poem by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady. Though Kerouac, as mentioned previously, was best known for his novels, especially On the Road, he also wrote and published a number of Beat poems.