The Beat Poets

by Tiffiny Costello


THE BEAT POETS

While the term "beat" originated from Herbert Hunke in the 1940s to describe his feeling of being "beaten by the world" (Watson 4), the word eventually evolved into "beatnik." Jack Kerouac, one of the famed Beat Poets, gave the word life by combining it with the "sputnik" that had just been launched by Russia. A lone satellite hurdling through space on its' own, as is the lone bohemian beat poet; or by then, Beatnik. 

The Beats were known for their black tights, adoration for saucy jazz, and for being somewhat nomadic and detached in their physical being, but also in their spiritual and mental being. The original leaders of the hipsters created not only an accepting world for other artistic-types, but also sought out their own escapades, even if they seemed float through the world. Allen Ginsberg, his most famous poem recently adorned in the film, "Howl," Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Gregory Korso are some of the most in vogue and most remembered of the Beatniks because of their literary works and lofty "angel-headed hipster" lifestyles. 


One of the most famous poems to come out of the Beatnik Era was Ginsberg's "Howl." It went to trial because it was considered obscure, insulting, and pejorative. During the mid-20th Century, books were being banned and Ginsberg's "Howl" was on it's way to the banned list. However, Ginsberg won and the poem was not disheveled. It was a ground-breaking poem; calling out his friends and also a poetic cry for the homosexuals of the 40s and 50s. 


Below is an excerpt of the poem, "Howl." The first few lines are the most famous and most recognized in the poem. He dedicated the poem to Carl Solomon, who Ginsberg met while in a mental hospital. 

"Howl"

For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
              madness, starving hysterical naked, 
       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
              looking for an angry fix, 
       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- 
              ery of night, 
       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
              contemplating jazz, 
       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 
              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- 
              ment roofs illuminated, 
       who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 
              hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 
              among the scholars of war, 
       who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
              publishing obscene odes on the windows of the 
              skull, 
       who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- 
              ing their money in wastebaskets and listening 
              to the Terror through the wall, 
       who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 
              Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 
       who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 
              torsos night after night 
       with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- 
              cohol and cock and endless balls, 
       incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and 
              lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of 
              Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- 
              tionless world of Time between.

Works Cited

Watson, Steven The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944

          -1960, New York 1995.

Top Left Photo: http://www.dlackey.org/weblog/2006/07/

Photo: http://sonidodelatumba.blogspot.com/2008/12/los-beatniks-rebelde.html