The Beats essays

The Beats essays The 1950s saw a rise of a new sub-culture or as some prefer to call it literary generation group. The young rebelled against postwar changes in American life; they saw in the rapid development of the nation a threat to the respect to humans spiritual value, they feared mechanization of the world and uniforming of the society. The spheres of life in which their rebellion was observable was their actual life- and writing- style. About the first let us say that a typical Beat was a rebel without a cause leading a shocking to the conservative America life they did not restrain themselves from drugs, sexual promiscuity, stealing and other morally dubious behavior . They went to great lengths to show their individualism and differentness. When it comes to literature the Beats opposed literary formalism of the 1940s, they insisted on new, spontaneous, more open art which would visibly contrast with literary tradition. The major representatives of the Beat Generation were Allan Ginsberg (Howl - ), Jack Kerouac (On the Road 1957) and William Burroughs (Junkie 1953). Although all of these men were in agreement with the Beat Generation ideas they did not turn their back to literary tradition completely. They seem especially indebted to transcendental writers as Emerson and Thoreau and the resulting Walt Whitman. Also they found inspiration in William Blake and his mysticism which stemmed from a desire to achieve the mystical, and it the wish to broaden the mind and attain the spiritual that inspired the Beats to experiment with substances as Benzedrine and marijuana. As Rulad and Bradburry note in From Puritanism to Postmodernism, Allen Ginsbergs Howl has been in several ways a return and response to Whitmans vision; he measured the nations fall from grace and expressed his own pain as well as d ...