About the author
My name is Bethany York, and I am currently a freshman at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. I am a Political Science major, but I thoroughly enjoy poetry, and that's why I signed up to take this poetry class for Non-English majors. I have discovered a lot of new and interesting things about poetry throughout this course that I was never exposed to during high school, and it has been a very eye-opening experience to all of the different styles that are out there.
about this cite
In this cite that I have created for my course's final project, I take a look into a group of poets known of as the Beat Poets. More specifically, I look into the life of one of the men in particular: Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The Beats
In the 1950's, a group of novelists and poets began writing about the uneasiness, the anger, and the disappointment of their contemporary young generation in their literature. Among them were Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The Beats were also known of as the "Beatniks" after Russia's "Sputnik" because they were seen as being far from mainstream, and they tended to be a little pro-Communism in a time where Communism was highly looked down upon. They revolted against militarism, denounced the society crises and dehumanization, and supplanted society with their own life-style and values: free love and communal living. Many of them were homosexual or bisexual. They grew their hair out long, and they usually dressed in well-worn jeans, an old T-shirt, a sweater, and a pair of sandals, disregarding the contemporary style of dress and personal cleanliness. They preached non-violence in the form of flower power, found an escape into Buddhism or other esoteric cults, or simply hit the road following Kerouac’s example. Their problem was the problem of all the young people who faced life in the immediate after-war. Trapped in a society that they didn't like, they escaped it by creating their own world. They lived in small bands according to the primitive code based on a strong sense of friendship. When they made use of drugs, alcohol and jazz, they only wanted to have an illusion of escaping their present reality. They experimented with a lot of different drugs and issues that were not socially acceptable, and they were seen as being extremely racy. The original Beat Generation writers met in New York, but later, in the mid-1950's, most of the central figures ended up together in San Francisco where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. In the 1960's, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie counterculture.
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"Nobody knows whether we were catalysts, or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose." ~Allen Ginsberg
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today." ~Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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