Beatnik poetry of the 1950-60s
The post-World War II years produced an abundance of strong poetry but no individual poet as dominant and accomplished as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, or William Carlos Williams, whose long careers were coming to an end. The major poetry from 1945 to 1960 was modernist in its ironic texture yet formal in its insistence on regular rhyme and metre. By the mid-1950s, however, a strong reaction developed. Poets began to turn away from Eliot and metaphysical poetry, by which many poets of late 40s were influenced (for instance, Robert Lowell), to more romantic or more prosaic models. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, there were a variety of poets and schools, who rebelled against the self-constraints and experimented with more open forms and more colloquial styles. Partly this rebellion was caused by the appearance in the 1950s of the postmodern «beat movement» in the USA. Beat movement, which is also called «beat generation», was the American social and literary movement originated in the 1950s and centred in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco's North Beach, Los Angeles' Venice West, and New York City's
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is eternity! Everyman's an angel! Ginsberg uses in the poem the rhythms of the rolling, crashing words: By about 1960, when the faddish notoriety of the movement had begun to fade, it had produced a number of interesting and promising writers, including Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder, and had paved the way for acceptance of other unorthodox and previously ignored writers, such as the Black Mountain poets and the novelist William Burroughs. Kerouac did write some poetry although is considered to be the novelist. But his influence on poetry was not in his own verses (his two collections «Scattered poems» and «Poems all size». Kerouac is mostly famous for his experiments with Japanese verse. Kerouac reworked the definition of the haiku – Japanese poem – form, just as he changed the standards of prose. When Kerouac wrote "No time for poetry but exactly what is," he drew reference to achieving the Zen state of mind in which a poet writes of things as they are. Knowing the basic characteristics of haiku, Kerouac's attraction to this poetic form is clear. Using a short poem to present a simple image or event allowed Kerouac to be spontaneous, to create his own portrait using subtleties and direct thought. Kerouac revealed a true spirituality in this one breath of haiku, like the continuous breath in the jazz passages that attracted him. Using
Some topics in this essay:
War II,
Philip Whalen,
Jack Kerouac,
Whitman Testament,
Neal Cassady's,
Blues Haikus,
Greenwich Village,
William Burroughs,
City Hall,
Holy Holy,
holy holy,
holy holy holy,
jack kerouac,
beat movement,
war ii,
allen ginsberg,
world war,
world war ii,
william burroughs,
ginsberg jack kerouac,
allen ginsberg jack,
carlos williams,
cross-country trips,
william carlos,
post-world war ii,
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Approximate Word count = 2481
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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