Allen Ginsberg, along with a few of his close friends, founded the movement that we know today as the Beat Generation. Ginsberg wrote about many topics, including gay rights, the decriminalization of drugs, free speech, and the general perversion of America’s political system. He wrote directly from his experience of being a homosexual man living in a time of challenging the traditional authorities and rules that once governed our lives. Ginsberg never wondered if what he wrote was too raw or obscene, he truly believed in free speech and did not care if a government read his work and thought it too inflammatory (this led to him being deported from several countries). In a time of emphasis on form in poetry, Ginsberg used long, free verse
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Ginsberg considered Whitman to be one of the greatest poetic writers in history and modeled his long free-verse style of poetry to that of Walt Whitman, most notably Leaves of Grass. Like Whitman, Ginsberg did not like writing poetry in the standard form of that time, he preferred writing in a stream of consciousness that was more natural, he attributed any standardized form in his poetry to pure accident because the mind occasionally thinks in poetic ways. He might have felt a close connection to Whitman because they were both homosexual. The poem A Supermarket in California directly speaks to Ginsberg’s love and admiration for Whitman,
What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon….
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. …show more content…
Post-war America was a place where people conformed to what mainstream society wanted them to be, but some individuals wanted no part of that system. These individuals included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burrough, also in a looser sense artists such as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac was the person who initially coined the phrase “Beat Generation”. The main group of Beat poets were people who attended Columbia at the same time. Even though these poets were all highly educated they all rebelled against the academic establishment, they especially disliked T.S. Eliot because he identified as an academic and they thought that that meant he was part of the system. They also disregarded his neo-classical formalism because they felt that it was too far removed from everyday life. The poets of old that they did appreciate and whom they modeled their work off of were mainly Romantic Era poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake, several of them also attributed their writing style to Henry David Thoreau. Many Americans at the time did not like these poets because of how and what they wrote. The people abhorred the blatant references to sexuality and drug use, Howl was particularly hated because of its references to homosexuality. Academics did not like the Beat poets because they felt as if the poets were immature, mainstream America did not like
Ginsberg considered Whitman to be one of the greatest poetic writers in history and modeled his long free-verse style of poetry to that of Walt Whitman, most notably Leaves of Grass. Like Whitman, Ginsberg did not like writing poetry in the standard form of that time, he preferred writing in a stream of consciousness that was more natural, he attributed any standardized form in his poetry to pure accident because the mind occasionally thinks in poetic ways. He might have felt a close connection to Whitman because they were both homosexual. The poem A Supermarket in California directly speaks to Ginsberg’s love and admiration for Whitman,
What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon….
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. …show more content…
Post-war America was a place where people conformed to what mainstream society wanted them to be, but some individuals wanted no part of that system. These individuals included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burrough, also in a looser sense artists such as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac was the person who initially coined the phrase “Beat Generation”. The main group of Beat poets were people who attended Columbia at the same time. Even though these poets were all highly educated they all rebelled against the academic establishment, they especially disliked T.S. Eliot because he identified as an academic and they thought that that meant he was part of the system. They also disregarded his neo-classical formalism because they felt that it was too far removed from everyday life. The poets of old that they did appreciate and whom they modeled their work off of were mainly Romantic Era poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake, several of them also attributed their writing style to Henry David Thoreau. Many Americans at the time did not like these poets because of how and what they wrote. The people abhorred the blatant references to sexuality and drug use, Howl was particularly hated because of its references to homosexuality. Academics did not like the Beat poets because they felt as if the poets were immature, mainstream America did not like