A History of American Literature

610 The American Century: Literature since 1945

“I hold the most archaic values on earth,” Snyder insists. “They go back to the

Paleolithic”; “I try to hold history and the wilderness in mind,” he has added, “that

my poems may approach the true nature of our times.” For him, identification with

“that other totally alien, nonhuman” can be experienced in tilling the soil, shaping

word or stone, “the lust and ecstasy of the dance,” or “the power-vision in solitude.”

And it has led him on naturally to a hatred of human assumptions of power and “the

ancient, meaningless / Abstractions of the educated mind.” His work celebrates such

primary rituals as hunting and feasting (“Eating each other’s seed / eating / ah, each

other”) and the mysteries of sex and birth (“How rare to be a human being!”); but,

with its commitment to participation in nature rather than possession of it, it is

equally capable of polemic, an unremitting radicalism of consciousness – something

that is especially noticeable when Snyder directs his attention to the ecology and the

“Men who hire men to cut groves / Kill snakes, build cities, pave fields.” It is at this

point, in particular, that Eastern and Western strains in his writing meet and marry.

Snyder has learned about “the buddha-nature,” the intrinsic vitality lurking in all

things, not just from Zen but from poets like Whitman; just as his habit of medita-

tion rather than appropriation has been borrowed from Thoreau as well as the

Buddhist tradition, and his belief in renewal springs from the spirit of the frontier as

much as from oriental notions of the eternal cycle. In his eyes, enlightenment

remains perpetually available, a fresh start can always be made. As Thoreau said at

the end of Walden – and Snyder borrows the line for one of his poems – “The sun is

but a morning-star”: each day represents a new opportunity to recover the nobility

of life, to turn aside from use to wonder.

Recreating American rhythms: The beat generation

Snyder, Ferlinghetti, and many of the other San Francisco poets were also involved

in the activities of another group that rose to prominence and notoriety in the 1950s,

commonly known as the beat generation. The term “beat generation” seems to have

been coined by one of the most famous members of the group, Jack Kerouac, and it

has several relevant connotations. In a musical sense, the word “beat” suggests

keeping the beat, being in the groove or harmony with others. More specifically, it

implies the jazz beat: beat poetry is, as one of the group has termed it, “typewriter-

jazz,” aimed at catching the abrupt, syncopated rhythms, the improvisational dash

and bravura of jazz, bebop, and swing. In a social, psychological, and vaguely

political sense, “beat” connotes the “beaten” condition of the outsider, who is down

perhaps but certainly not out. Like so many Romantic and American writers, the

beats cherished the stance of the alienated, the dispossessed, and even the nominally

insane: those who look at normal, “square” society from the periphery and reject its

discipline and codes. As Allen Ginsberg put it, echoing a whole line of poets from

Blake to Whitman and Dickinson, “The madman is holy as you my soul are holy.”

Finally, in a spiritual sense, “beat” is related to “beatitude” and describes the

innocence, blessedness, and raptness of what Ginsberg called “angel-headed hipsters

burning for the ancient heavenly connection”: the pursuit of “visionary

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