On October 7, 1955 a poetry reading
occurred in The Six Gallery which
forever altered the face of American literature. A group of friends that included Allen
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac,
Kenneth Rexroth, Phil
Lamanita, Michael McClure,
Philip Walen, and Gary
Snyder gathered for this reading and they would be the poets and writers would later make up the Beat
Generation along with Gregory Corso,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
and William Burroughs. This
was the first public reading of Howl from an unknown 29 year old Allen Ginsberg
and this would also be the starting point for this literary movement. A year later Howl and other Poems was published
and what became known as The San Francisco Renaissance had begun.
This group of friends had become
frustrated with the current tide of acceptable literature and poetry which followed in the wake of T.S. Eliot's
The Wasteland. They
rejected this intellectual classicism which was dominant and brought to the forefront of American literature new
vitality which was lacking in the deadbeat verse of poets attempting to live up to Eliot. Corso, Ginsberg, and
Kerouac all were proud Americans and they thought America had the potential to be the greatest country in the world
but they were deeply frustrated by what was occurring in their beloved country such as racism and religious persecution.
These ambiguous patriotic feelings are best exemplified in Corso's poems The
American Way and Elegiac Feelings American and in Ginsberg's
poem America and Baggage Claim at Greyhound.
The new vitality which they inspired through their fiction and poetry was a criticism of the hysteria which resulted
due to cold war fear and also the political persecution which was best exemplified in the McCarthy hearings. These
writers were very influenced by Walt Whitman
and Robert Frost and they saw these men as great patriots who were terribly frustrated with America and this disheartened
love led to their criticism. Not only did Frost and Whitman display similar disenchantment with the American political
climate but they also shared the Beats love of the freedom and power of the road which is evident in Whitman's
Song of the Open Road and
Frost's The Road Not Taken.
This rejection of typical American
values such as suburban bliss led to a mentality which was rootless and a quest to experience the land they so
dearly loved. This desire for physical mobility led to a new notion of the American dream which was embracing the
virtues of freedom and travel that in many ways clearly rejected the post war ideal of making roots and living
in a whitewashed house with a picket fence. They valued not the established but the transitory and the improvised
and this was characterized by their lives but also by their writings which embraced fleeting virtues of the moment
instead of the perfected ideal of the permanent.
The Beats saw the American dream as an experience
anyone could attain which was accomplished by meeting the great land which was the subject of their endless verse.
They took the written word and harnessed the vitality of life experience and funneled it through their political
and social criticism of the land they loved. The result was a literary movement based upon rebellion and dependent
on physical mobility but this rebellion was also an attempt to outrun the Government which often impeded there
ability to accomplish the freedom they dearly cherished.