The American Century: Literature since 1945 611consciousness” through music or meditation, drugs, mantras, or poems. “The only
poetic tradition is the voice out of the burning bush,” insisted Ginsberg, and that
sums up an impulse shard by most of the beat generation. They were, undoubtedly,
a remarkable social phenomenon: part of a decade that seemed suddenly to have
invented adolescence and rebellion. More important, though, they were and are part
of a great tradition that identifies imaginative writing with prophecy.
The beat generation was initially associated with New York, but it first attracted
the interest of a larger public when, in 1956, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Gregory Corso
joined Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Whalen, and others in public reading appearances in the
coffeehouses and colleges of San Francisco. And national fame was almost guaranteed
with the confiscation of copies of Ginsberg’s Howl by the San Francisco police in the
same year – on the grounds that, as the Collector of Customs put it, “The words and
the sense of the writing are obscene.” Howl, Ginsberg’s first published book of poems
(although by no means his first stab at poetry), then sold over fifty thousand copies
within a relatively brief period of time. Along with Kerouac’s On the Road, it became
what Kenneth Rexroth, something of a father-figure for some of the beats, called
“the confession of faith of the generation that is going to be running the world in
1965 and 1975 – if it is still there to run.” For a while, the figure of the beat or the
beatnik even attracted national media attention, although he (and it was usually a
“he” rather than a “she”) tended to be considered only to be mocked and dismissed.
Time magazine, for instance, referred to the beat as “a rebel without a cause who
shirks responsibility on the grounds that he has the H-bomb jitters.” The liberal
establishment was hostile, too: the critic and journalist Norman Podhoretz (1930–),
for example, declared, “No new territory is being staked out by these writers,” while
Diana Trilling (1905–1996) sniffily observed, “There is no more menace in ‘Howl’ or
On the Road than there is in the Scarsdale PTA.” What such commentators seemed
to object to was that, while the beat generation was anti-establishment, it was not
involved with the kind of programmatic leftism that characterized many of the
writers of the 1930s. Rather, it was committed to what critic Norman O. Brown
(1913–2002) termed “metapolitics:” the politics of Blake, that is, in which
psychological or spiritual freedom is the only sure warrant for political freedom.
There was, perhaps, no surer exponent of “metapolitics” than the greatest poet of
the beat generation, Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997). When he took part in a demon-
stration against American involvement in Vietnam, for instance, he carried a placard
that declared simply, “War is black magic.” With him, as he said, poetry was “a cata-
lyst to visionary states of mind”; and he was assisted in his pursuit of a visionary goal
by a mystical experience he had while still quite young. As he described it, he was
reading Blake’s poem “Ah, Sun-Flower!” when he heard Blake’s voice reciting the
lines; it seemed to him, listening, as if “God had a human voice.” He then had, he
said, “the consciousness of being alive unto myself, alive myself unto the creator”;
more than that, he became convinced that he was “the son of the Creator – who
loved me ... or who responded to my desire.” At first, Ginsberg attempted to insert
his prophetic vision into what he later termed “overwritten coy stanzas, a little after
Marvell, a little after Wyatt.” This came to an end when William Carlos WilliamsGGray_c05.indd 611ray_c 05 .indd 611 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM