The Beat Generation were a group of American writers who emerged in the 1950s in response to World War II and rejection of prevailing middle-class values. Key members included Allen Ginsberg, whose poem Howl criticized restrictive American assumptions, and Gary Snyder, whose work resisted cultural authority. The Beat poets wrote in a spontaneous style with free verse and sought to bring poetry to the streets. Their work was influenced by Romantic poets and jazz music and explored themes of politics, Buddhism, and social commentary.

3. Table of Contents:
• Introduction
• Characteristics
• Key Poets & their Works
• Influence
• Contribution
• Criticism

4. also known as the beat movement,
were a group of American writers who
emerged in the 1950s.

5. Introduction
• The Beat Movement was considered a response to World War II.
• People rejected the prevailing American middle-class values and
materialism of modern society, throwing out the old rules of literature,
music, taboos and religion.
• Originality and individuality came with uniform style of seedy dress,
manners, and “hip” vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians, with no
perfection of style.

6. Most Influential Members of Beat
Generation:

7. Characteristics
• Beat refers to pure and beautiful, or exhausted and trodden down. The
original coinage of “Beat” was meant to imply a people beaten down and
walked over.
• They advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through
drugs, jazz, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism.
• Politics also factored into much of Beat poetry.

8. Characteristics
• Literature became more bold, straightforward, and expressive than anything
before.
• They sought to bring poetry “back to the streets” to the people.
• The verse was frequently free, chaotic and unstructured, liberally sprinkled with
obscenities, in a spontaneous, creative style.
• They believed in composition in which the writer put down his thoughts and
feelings without plan or revision - to convey the immediacy of individual
experience.

9. Example

10.  Jack Kerouac
 Lawrence Ferlinghetti
 Gregory Corso
 Allen Ginsberg
 William Burroughs
The main actors:

11. Key Poets of Beat Movement:
• Allen Ginsberg (Howl-1956)
• Gary Synder (Riprap- 1959)
• Gregory Corso (Bomb- 1958)
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti ( I Am Waiting)
The primary focus of these poets were on specific issues of
contemporary social and political interest.

12. Allen Ginsberg
• Allen Ginsberg was a high school teacher, poet and a moderate Jewish
Socialist. His Beat poetry marks the transition from modernism to
postmodernism.
• His famous poem Howl is an outcry against the restrictive, conventional
assumptions of middle-class America.

13. Howl

14. • Ginsberg provides perhaps the most comprehensive diagnosis of
America's social and political psyche.
• "Howl" (1956),though not based on specific socio-political
situations, still provides strong social commentary.

15. Gary Synder
• Bruce Cook said it well:
“If Ginsberg is the Beat movement's Walt
Whitman, Gary Snyder is the Henry David
Thoreau.”
• His Beat poetry is marked as a clear
resistance against cultural authority.
• In Riprap, Japan becomes a symbol of
poet’s belief in society that isn’t consumer-
obsessed as America.

17. Gregory Corso
• Corso’s "anarchic style (is) similar to Ginsberg's, though
his favorite poet is Shelley, a Romantic poet who was
much too flowery for most Beats.”
• Corso equates the Bomb with various incarnations of the
godhead, speaking of it in religious terms and assigning it
cosmic powers of creation and destruction.
• Corso also deplores war as man's deadliest enemy, and
he considers the abuse of power as an egregious offense.
• Corso's vision of a pure, unstained America, and his faith
in a re-awakening of consciousness are the hall- marks of
his remarkable Beat poetry.

19. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• He served the U.S Navy in WWII as a ship's commander.
• In 1951, he taught French in an adult education program
until he met Peter D. Martin and the pair went on to found
the City Lights Bookstore in 1953.

20. • His Beat poetry is often concerned with politics and social issues
and it is deeply infused in the tradition.
• Although, his poetry is autobiographical but it is not excessively
self-contained.

22. Influence on The Beat Generation
• Romantic poets were major influences on the Beat aesthetics, especially Percy
Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.
• The Beats were closely connected with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance
Movement, such as Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan.
• They were also influenced by jazz music, which was still seen as somewhat
outrageous.
• Buddhism particularly was significant to many of the Beat poets and it figured into
much of their work.

23. CONTRIBUTION OF BEAT POETS
• The Beat Generation made a long-term impact on the composition of
contemporary American society.
• The Beats propelled thought of conservationism and environmentalism
into the mainstream.
• The Beat Generation also encouraged the Black Mountain poets, so
named as they wrote for the Black Mountain Review.

24. CRITICISM
• Mainstream America was shocked by their invented sexual deviancy and
illegal drug use.
• The academic community derided the Beats as anti-intellectual and
unrefined.
• Established poets and novelists looked down upon the carefree attitude of
Beat literature.
• Hence, the Beat Generation faded from view as quickly as it appeared.

25. Thank You