Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac waited in New York City for their compatriots of the arts. Neal Cassidy with Ken Kesey and the merry pranksters set out from Columbus Street, in front of City Lights Bookstore, owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Gary Snyder would stay in the safety of the Pacific California coast, but his spirit would follow them in the asian eastern chantings of the Tao. The albatross for these poetic travellers would fly onwards into the recesses of mind. Kesey sings his song of creation for modern day mariners, but never lets the arrow of death fall for this winged carrier of flight. This deception of death freed many a fellow sourjoner of his generation, and served to seperate the era from the last remaining contraints of the illusion of early l9th century romanticism.
Kesey fell into the same river as many writers from the American West. Like Mark Twain and Jack London before him, his writing combines a realistic quality set against the backdrop of the natural world. This realism combined with the totality of individual expression categorizes Kesey in the same river of romanticism as Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and London. He differs from the romantic expression of character, only by use of the narrative subconscious, first carried into literary expertise by James Joyce, and later given even a stronger voice by Henry Miller. In this way, Kesey served to redefine romanticism for his generation, while avoiding the standard cliche's that most writers normally sink, eventually drowning beneath such wakes.
The tone of Howl by Ginsberg set the setting for the east coast beats living in New York City. The city described in this poem is a frightening place, where drugs are consumed, the soul of the self suffocated by the buildings of skyscraper and stone. Cold and merciless, his characters are buried by the societal constraints of the mob. More terrifying than the interzone of Burroughs, the streets of New York lead into the blackness and depths of the abyss of a Beckett like stage. Scenes of drug addicts, unemployed workers, insanity, labor conflicts, destruction of the environment and soul are described in detail with vivid stark imagery. These characters are destroyed, haunted by the remanents of a now buried democracy. Ginsberg would later sing an ode for America; an America that had not yet been born.
Kerouac would write of his travels describing the land that he knew. He would live in the east but would eventually
