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Chapter Four develops the previous chapter’s investigation into the substantial influence of translated Chinese and Japanese philosophical writing on presentations of an ecological Nature in Cold War American literature. However, it differs in its countercultural focus, exploring the influence of Americanised translations of Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy on the work of the Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg and Kerouac’s extensive correspondence reveals the two writers’ developing interest in Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought, and their co-development of their own Americanised and highly inauthentic ‘Beat Zen’, which was heavily influenced by Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (1932). Taking these letters as its starting point, the chapter reveals that translated Taoism and Zen Buddhism informed each writer’s ecological depictions of the human relationship to Nature in some of their most famous contributions to Beat literature, including Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958) and Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956).

This chapter focuses on Allen Ginsberg's “Prose Contribution to Cuban Revolution,” which attributes the revolution's blind spot in regards to sexuality to Castro's continued adherence to puritanical outlooks—outlooks which Ginsberg, sounding much like Duncan at the end of World War II, ascribed to patriarchal and homophobic forms of nationalism, which replicated the repressive socio-political structures that U.S. artists and intellectuals hoped the revolution would ultimately shun. While Ginsberg was openly impressed with economic reform and the island's literacy programs, he ultimately dismissed the promises of the revolution on what he identified as “humanist grounds.”

This chapter tries to align Bob Dylan with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and to determine which of the two serves as Dylan's mentor, noting that Kerouac and Ginsberg had been closely identified with each other and with the Beat movement of the 1950s. The two discovered their irreconcilable differences during the 1960s; Kerouac became disenchanted with the mass counterculture inspired by the Beats' minority subculture, while Ginsberg became a countercultural figurehead. The chapter reveals the tension that informs Dylan's remarkable achievement and places him firmly within the Beat legacy.

Opening with Allen Ginsberg’s reading of the incomplete Howl at the Six Gallery in the fall of 1955, this chapter follows the composition of the poem, its publication, and the subsequent censorship battle. The poem is placed within the heated context of fears about repression and the atomic bomb. Ginsberg’s poem, with its excessive images of violence, sexuality, and potential for liberation, captures aspects of the developing New Sensibility. The chapter examines how Ginsberg rebelled against the Cold War conformity of the period, helping to push forward art that was unhampered by constraints. The chapter concludes with victory for Ginsberg’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, against those who would censor Howl.

For Allen Ginsberg, Blake was more than a poetic influence, he was a spiritual forefather. Blake played an integral role in Ginsberg’s relentless self-fashioning and Ginsberg repeatedly turned to Blake in his search for poetic and social freedoms. Blake became a figurehead of the drug-fuelled psychedelic revolution of which Ginsberg was part. But Ginsberg’s Blakeanism went far beyond the claims of the drug culture towards a more serious and thoughtful poetic engagement with freedom and form, influence and authenticity. Like many of the older generation of American poets, Ginsberg yoked Blake together with Whitman. He saw them as icons of gay and homosocial culture, who debunked the prejudices of social conservatism and advocated an ethic of sexual openness and communality. Blake became an aid to a more affectionate re-envisioning of the myth of America, where tenderness and embrace were a means to positive social action.

As John Clellon Holmes tried to deal with the disappointment of his novel’s rejection by Knopf, he began to realize that he was closer to an answer to his dilemma than he thought after reading portions of the manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City, including its description of Allen Ginsberg and others in their crowd. On February 23, 1949, Holmes met Herbert Huncke for the first time, catching a glimpse of the gritty reality that would become the material for “The Transgressors.” Huncke, an indigent thief, hustler, and drug addict, had been an early guide for Kerouac, Ginsberg, and William Burroughs in their nightly prowls in Times Square. By the middle of April 1949, Holmes decided to abandon “The Transgressors,” but suddenly became visible in the world of poetry. As he contemplated using Ginsberg as the subject of his next novel, Holmes became more interested in the “visions” and what their meaning was for his friend.

During the early Cold War, inter-Americanism often took shape in the genre of postromantic meditations on pre-Columbian ruins. These ruin poems are usually understood as expressions of universal humanism, exercises in postmodern tourism, symptoms of neo-imperial fortune hunting, or preludes to 1970s ethnopoetics. By contrast, the chapter argues that ruin poems galvanized by Pablo Neruda’s “Heights of Macchu Picchu” and Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers” respond to the rapid demise of the movement for hemispheric democracy. Through their identifications with indigenous civic histories, poets critiqued the collapse of political and cultural inter-Americanism. Moving beyond poets like Neruda and Olson who had previously maintained a formal relation to Good Neighbor diplomacy, it shows how even Allen Ginsberg’s poetic theories developed during sojourns in Mayan Mexico, and the tropes of ruin poetry subtend the “destroyed” generation in “Howl” (1956), as well as poems by writers in his cohort such as Philip Lamantia and Ernesto Cardenal.

The Fugs’ music drew on writers as diverse as Blake, Swinburne, Auden and Ginsberg, creating entirely new forms of reception for texts that had traditionally been consigned to the page. And yet, most histories of 1960s countercultural music tend to elide the Fugs both as punk precursors and as riotous cultural critics who reconciled nineteenth and twentieth century poetry with rock ‘n’ roll before Lou Reed, Patti Smith or Richard Hell’s own invocations of bardic authority. This chapter traces how the Fugs’s “low fi noisy shit about poetry sex and drugs” reveals them to be the first rock band to show how poetry and rock could work together to promote a visibly confrontational and noisy youth-oriented sensibility.

Between 1952 and 1956, John Clellon Holmes struggled financially because what he was earning as a writer was not enough. In late September 1953 he met Jack Kerouac unexpectedly, when he and his wife Shirley visited Allen Ginsberg in his new apartment on the Lower East Side in New York City. It was there that Holmes first met William Burroughs, whose first book, Junky, had been published in April by Ace Books. Meanwhile, Kerouac traveled again to California in late December to take a job parking cars, set up for him by Neal Cassady. While he was living in San Jose with the Cassadys, Kerouac began a spiritual journey after discovering Buddhism that fueled his writing. Holmes felt devastated when his book was rejected by Scribner’s, coupled with Bantam’s decision not to release their paperback edition of Go. On September 5, 1957, Kerouac’s novel On the Road was published as he was living again with Joyce Glassman on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.

Following an overview of canonical Beat Generation artists such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, this chapter examines the status of women writers in the 1950s and a close reading of James Baldwin’s Another Country.

Today, we may know confessional poetry as a set of texts that are printed in books, but in its time it was also a performance genre. This chapter demonstrates how the performance of poems—in the privacy of the poet’s study, at public poetry readings, and in the studios of recorded literature companies—shaped this genre, determined its tactics, and influenced its style. An extended comparison of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg shows that breath was a key medium for confessional poets, and a study of Anne Sexton’s career—both on the page and at the podium—shows how she “breathed back” dead poems in live performance. Throughout, this chapter focuses on the feelings of embarrassment confessional poetry raised, and the uses to which poets could put such feelings. It also highlights contemporary trends in “performance” and their impact on confessional poets—e.g., Anne Sexton’s debt to the acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky and to Method acting as theorized by American director Lee Strasberg.

Discusses the religious significances of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and the Beat movement. Argues Burroughs is an outlier figure. Kerouac in particular exemplifies American religious immediatism.

For the most part, transnational literary studies has been concerned with a revision of the First World–Third World binary inherited from postcolonial theory. But the Second World—that created by the Cold War—complicates this. This chapter argues that the inability of postcolonial theory to accommodate this major geopolitical dynamic is reflected in poetry also, and necessarily leads to the question of how we can understand poets such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney as Cold War poets. Postcolonialism harbored forces inimical to US democracy in the 1950s and 1960s; these poets, who established their renown in the US from the 1970s onwards, made postcolonial safe for America.

As insecure, aspiring young novelists, John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac engaged each other in unacknowledged competition. Their disputes shaped the artistic path each of them would ultimately follow. In May 1948, after finishing the first draft of his novel The Town and the City, Kerouac started writing his road novel, even as he had difficulty finding an appropriate title. The problem was that he remained under the stylistic influence of Thomas Wolfe. Meanwhile, Holmes and Neal Cassady had been corresponding frequently over the previous weeks, something of which Kerouac seemed to be unaware. More than a year after he started writing Go, Holmes finished the first draft of the novel on February 23, 1951. His description of Cassady in the book was not in accord with Kerouac’s and Allen Ginsberg’s idealized view of their friend. Kerouac had also completed On the Road.

When Go was finally published, it did not get the attention John Clellon Holmes had expected. On October 12, 1952, Go received its first long review courtesy of the New York Herald Tribune, although it was generally a negative one. The most significant, albeit also negative, review was written by Gilbert Milstein on November 9, 1952 for the New York Times. Titled “The ’Kick’ That Failed,” the article was a forerunner of the hostile media storm that hounded the writers of the Beat Generation. Meanwhile, Kerouac traveled to Mexico City and stayed at William Burroughs’ apartment. From there, he wrote Allen Ginsberg on May 17, 1952, informing him that he had just mailed the new “sketching” version of On the Road, now titled Visions of Cody, to their friend Carl Solomon, an editor at Ace Books. That June, Kerouac wrote to Holmes to discuss the jazz novels they each planned to write. Holmes continued to write and rewrite the first chapters of his sequel to Go, giving it the title Perfect Fools.

In search of an outlet for his book Love & Death, Legman joined Irving “Jay” Landesman in publishing the little magazine Neurotica: A Journal of Lay Psychoanalysis (1948-51).This chapter sets out the history of Neurotica and unfolds its transformation under Legman’s editorship from a poetry journal to a forceful, enigmatic voice of postwar alienation. Legman and Landesman collected a small group of New York writers who would later be called “Beats” (including Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, and Chandler Brossard) and began to publish their harsh criticisms of American conformity. Legman’s essays, including pieces of Love & Death, were the fiercest attacks on American culture, and he soon made Neurotica a pointed and provocative experiment in describing American consumerism. Legman engaged the young Marshall McLuhan in Neurotica’s explorations of the weirdness of American advertising. The magazine attracted the attention of postal inspectors, and Legman found himself under investigation for sending obscene materials through the mail. A finding against him effectively ended Neurotica and Legman’s mail-order book business.

Less than a month after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Clellon Holmes finished his new jazz novel, titled The Horn. By this time, he and Kerouac were already the object of strong media interest in connection with the Beat phenomenon, and also began to reap some of its more obvious rewards. Holmes was offered by Esquire much more money than he used to receive to write an essay explaining the Beat Generation to the magazine’s upscale readers, while Kerouac was busy talking to interviewers to answer the same questions. The “Beat frenzy” sweeping over the two novelists had surfaced at a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, with Allen Ginsberg reading the first part of Howl. There were efforts to belittle the Beats, including that of journalist Herb Caen, who coined the word “Beatnik” in his San Francisco Chronicle column on April 2, 1958.