Beat Movement

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Revision as of 19:49, 25 June 2007

• Literary group (also called "Beats" or "Beat Generation") that flourished from the mid-1950s until the early 1960s. The group was mainly located in San Francisco and Greenwich Village, NYC.
• It can be divided into two distinct phases: a) the 'underground' from 1944- 56 and b) the 'public' from 1956-62.
• Novelist John Clellon Holmes introduced the term B.G. in a 1952 essay on his novel "Go". Later, Jack Kerouac suggested that 'Beat' meant being socially marginalized and exhausted ['beaten down'] and blessed ['beatific']. There are also musical connotations to the name as many members were jazz enthusiasts.
• Socially the Beats, many of whom were homosexual, extolled individual freedom and attacked what they saw as the materialism, militarism, consumerism and conformity of the 1950s. To this end they affected non-conformist styles of dress and speech and, avowedly anti-materialist, they<cultivated mystical experiences by the use of drugs or by meditation. Many<members developed an interest in forms of mysticism and in Zen Buddhism.
• The Beats were politically radical, and to some degree their<anti-authoritarian attitudes were taken up by activists in the 1960s. In their writing they encouraged direct and frank communication and, rejecting the formalist impersonal writing encouraged by the 'New Criticism', they cultivated styles that gave the impression of spontaneity and improvisation.
• Much Beat poetry was performance oriented, i.e. often read in public with jazz accompaniments. The Beats, among them novelists Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, brought fresh energies into American writing during the Age of Anxiety/ Tranquility of the 1950s, and their influence has been significant since.