De la generación beat

The Beat Generation

“Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?”

― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Beat Generation refers to the men and women poets, writers, thinkers, and philosophers who emerged on the hip scene in the 1940s and ballooned into the San Francisco Renaissance and beyond. The concept of “beat generation” was coined by Jack Kerouac when thinking of “beatific.”

The original beats emerged in the 40s, and were a small group of friends, consisting of Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Joan Vollmer Adams, William Burroughs, Edie Parker, Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes, and a few others. Initially, this group began to fade out.

Who the beats were and what they did is largely documented in their own writings. Eventually, more movements were formed, such as the “hippies,” which had their roots in the beats. Some of the beats, such as Ginsberg and Cassady, evolved right along with the times and were well-known for participating in Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Ginsberg went on to help form Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at the Naropa Institute.

The beat generation was a phenomenon that is regarded as a great and moving cluster of individuals who changed culture, literature, and history in their flight. Beat classes are becoming more popular in universities, online forums are devoted to discussions of the beats, beat-related books and products have their highest sales ever, and so on. The beats, once alive, are still alive. The beat generation, a wide array of various individuals, is much more expansive than the big trio of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. Because the majority of beats are still alive, still publishing, and influential in the writings of many younger people, it’s difficult to propose that the beat generation ever stopped. Its media eyeball has been greatly distorted, and because of this, we either must remove the media myths or create our own. One thing to be sure, the beat generation offered a renaissance period, one whose punctuations have not all been seen.

Today many are inspired by the original beats, and what evolved later. Neo-beat movements that do not understand the implicit spirituality in the beats’ writings are often misguided by what the beats were after.

Beat Art

There was a movement in the 1950s that some term as rebel art, or abstract expressionism. This movement began in the 1940s in New York City, and like the beat poetry of the time, was full of spontaneous expression–escaping traditional and conventional art forms and applying different styles of painting. The paintings meant quick and fluid strokes on large canvases and seemed chaotic–but, in fact, much like beat writings, this art was very conceptual if not planned.

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