"This Is The Beat Generation" by John Clellon Holmes
"The origins of the word "beat" are obscure, but the meaning is only to clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness."
“The burden of my generation was the
knowledge that something rational had caused all this (the feeling that something
had gotten dreadfully, dangerously out of hand in our world--this vast maelstrom
of death...the concentration camps that proved too real) and that nothing
rational could end it....The bombs had gotten bigger, but the politics had
stayed the same. The burden of my generation was to carry this in utter helplessness---the
genocide, the overkill--and still seek love in the underground where all living
things hide if they are to survive our century.”
Source: New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952
“Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation” by Jack Kerouac
“The Beat Generation,
that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg
in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated
hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking
everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way…It
meant characters of a special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were
solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization—the
subterraneans heroes who’d finally turned from the “freedom”
machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of
isight, experiencing the ‘derangement of the senses,’ talking
strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture…”
Source: Esquire, March 1958
“[Beat is] 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.”
--Jack Kerouac
“I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
dynamo in the machinery of night ... “
--Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
Sing a song of sad young men
Glasses full of rye
All the news is bad again so
Kiss your dreams goodbye
All the sad young men sitting in the bars
Knowing neon nights. missing all the stars
All the sad young men drifting through the town
Drinking up the night trying not to drown
All the sad young men singing in the cold
Trying to forget that they're growing old
All the sad young men choking on their worth
Trying to be brave, running from the truth
Autumn turns the leaves to gold
Slowly dies the heart
Sad young men are growing old
And that's the cruelest part
All the sad young men seek a certain smile
Someone they can hold for a little while
Tired little girl does the best she can
Trying to be gay for her sad young man
While the grimy moon watches from above
All the sad young men play of making love
Misbegotten moon shine for sad young men
Let your gentle light guide them home tonight
All the sad young men
Source: “The Nervous Set” cast album, Columbia Records, 1959