Searching For The Amazing Internal Muse

"In the free evening of my day I give to you, readers, the foregoing garrulous talk, thoughts, reminiscences, As idly drifting down the ebb, Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore.

Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West, when it worthily rises--- First, what Herder taught Goethe young Goethe, that really great poetry is always(like the Homeric or Biblical Canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilige of a polished and select few; Second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung." (1)

If the poets of the Beat era exemplified any sort of movement as they developed their art, and rose in acclaim in regard to their poetry; it was an embrace of the idea that an artist be given the freedom to express her or his own inner voice in poetry or prose. Literature for the beats was about to break the bounds of reality that had come to define the realms of art in the modern age. What had started out as a group of rebellious kids having fun on the beaches of San Francisco and sharing love or poetic meter was now turning into a new form of literary art. There is a great deal of debate among scholars on whether the beats had meant for their poetry, journals, and prose to become the beginnings of an new literary movement. Most of the survivors of that era wandering around North Beach will tell you that the whole thing was an accident, that they were young idealists bouncing around the fronteirs of their own fantasies. Accidental or not, the beat movement would soon become an important part of the American literary spectrum, and would help to usher in some of the most important poetical forms of a new modern age of poetry. The Beats along with other international poets of their generation were part of a long line of poets who were rebelling against the constraints of an earlier Romantic period in literature. T.S. Elliot with his, "Waste Land" had helped to welcome the freedom of the modernist age. This is not to say that Elliot was a beat, but he definitely influenced these young poets as they daydreamed on the the summertime shores of North Beach.

The Beats like a lot of poets had become tired and bored with the standard modes of presenting poetry that had been given to them by earlier poets in the Romantic era. Borrowing from the classical period of poetry, the Romantics still held to some of the stringent

Go To Page: 1 2 3 4