Beat generation – Literary Terms

Beat generation, Literary Terms

 

Beat generation – Literary Terms

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Beat generation:

A group of poets and other writers of the 1950s and early 1960s, who expressed their alienation from society by: rebelling against both social and literary CONVENTIONS. They grew beards, wore blue jeans and sandals, experimented with Zen Buddhist meditation and hallucinogens, and spoke and wrote in private slang, all of which was startling behavior in the conformist 1950s.

The word beat might be assumed to imply that these writers were weary of life. However, Jack Kerouac, whose loosely structured novel On the Road made him the most widely known of the group pointed out that beat, short for beatific, suggested that the beat generation was "basically a religious generation," on a new spiritual quest. Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti found their audience in the San Francisco coffeehouses of the late 1950s, where they read their works aloud, sometimes to the accompaniment of jazz drumbeats. Ginsberg's long poem Howl is considered the major work of the movement.