What was the Beat Generation all about, anyway? Here’s Jack Kerouac’s answer, as quoted by fellow beatnik John Clellon Holmes: “It’s a kind of furtiveness. . . . Like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public,’ a kind of beatness—I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are—and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world. . . . So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.”
Got that? For further illumination, there’s this from Gregory Corso:
What we are witnessing is a delicate shift of total consciousness in America—It won’t be done through publicity or propaganda, articles or any form of—brainwashing persuasion—it will occur as response to altered history scene. . . . The shift and new recognition can only be incarnated and commenced thru great works of Art (as Whitman rightly demanded from poets to come)—Art to stand beacon like Statue naked and courageous, individual statement of private actual, uncensored individual perception. . . . Therefore a new art whose objectivity will be the accuracy of its introspection—the bringing forth of heretofore hidden materials, lusts, spiritual ambitions, experiences—in the new forms in which they will necessarily arrive—rather than the cringing self-consciousness of the psyche whose individuality has been so thwarted—that it masks itself and deceives others—under a guise of a received system of thought, of a system
