The Beat Movement in the Work of Allen Ginsberg :Lost Souls

Abstract

This article discusses the work of Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997); one of the most central figures in the American postwar poetic movement generally known under the term “Beat Movement”; also known as “Beat Generation” (Aronowitz 22, Bruce 3). It will discuss his aesthetics in terms of this movement’s cultural ideals of anti-establishment, anti-hegemony and anti-elitism, as well as its formal aesthetic practices of unfamiliarity, fluidity of structure, particularity of vocabulary/phraseology, and purist emotional content. It will argue, that the aesthetics of Ginsberg, and of his Beat Generation fellow poets, have been perhaps the first in the history of 20th century poetics to actively and consciously close up the gap between art and life attempting to actually live their poetry or, better still, produce a sort of poetics that is, itself, their very living and breathing lives. By contrast to many of the poetic experimentations across the 20th century, which, more or less, enacted the art-for-art’s-sake emblem with varying degrees of success, the Beat poets, represented here by Ginsberg, enact a radically different poetics where art and life are all but practically inseparable. Ginsberg’s work, and the Beat Generation’s at large, offer a poetics wholly entrenched in the individualist existential dilemmas and strive for being; an attempt for a complete integration of subject and language in poetic form.