472
CORRESPONDENCE
THE BEAT GENERATION
SIRS:
It would seem that Norman Podhor–
etz, in his article "The Know-Nothing
Bohemians," objected more violently
to certain instances of socio-ethical
nOl,-conformity in the Beat Genera–
tion than to its paucity of erudition,
:l~
the title of his essay states. It would
also seem that his essay was less an
attempt at objective literary criticism
than it was a kind of ill-concealed
rant. . .. Can it be that the Beat
Generation's biggest would-be detrac–
tOl·' are so taken up by the "violence
and madness" which they seem to point
out so readily as the exclusive content
of Beat literature, that they find no
room for the normal functions of li–
ter<"ry criticism? ...
If
any of the so-called criticism of
the so-called "Beat Generation" needs
a rebuttal (or at least an examination
of motives) it is Mr. Podhoretz's claim
tha~
this whole movement made him
nervous.... "Next thing you know,"
W.r Podhoretz says, "he'll be saying
that violence is just fine." Well, that's
just it. Violence
is
just fine. I don't
mean that someone ought to walk up
tc Mr. Podhoretz and smack him down,
but that this generation of writers must
resort to violence in literature, a kind
of violence that has in such a short
tir.'e begun to shake us out of the woe–
ful literary sterility which character–
ized the '40's, to pull us out of what
Dudley Fitts called (in his review of
William Meredith's new book of verse)
"an impoverished time, so far as po–
etry is concerned."
. . . I have read a great many of
theEe scathing rants that are being
palmed off as objective critical studies
of the "New Bohemianism," and al–
most without exception they have come
from the small coterie of quasi-novelists
or
New Yorker
suburban intellectual
types of the late '40's and early '50's
which represents so much of what Beat
is a reaction against. I t seems to me
thM Beat is less a movement than a
reaction. It is a reaction against, let
US
say to start, fifteen years of sterile,
unreadable magazine poetry: poetry, as
Mr. Fitts said so well, that is "neo–
gecrgian, preserved from the almost
obligatory dullness of the Georgians by
a mild freshness of invention and
an
agreeably disturbing wit." To my mind,
thi~
is not what poetry ought to be.
And Beat is also a reaction against
what Randall Jarrell calls "The Age
of Criticism."
. .. There was neither Bohemianism
nOr any great intellectual rebellion in
the '40's, and there was no poetry to
spral: of. (Poor Dylan Thomas carried
the ball all by himself in England, and
we all know what happened when
eventually he did get to America.) The
only persons that caused even a sem–
blance of a literary stir were a few
addlebrained individuals mumbling un–
der their breaths something about "cre–
ative criticism." There was nothing but
one great big void.
I respect Randall Jarrell, Robert
Lowell,
Karl
Shapiro,
Delmore
Schwartz, John Berryman, Peter Vie–
reck, George Barker, Stephen Spender,
I ,ouis Macniece, and others who were
so representative of what poetry was
ir. the '40's, as well as Eberhart,
Wil–
bur, Meredith, Merwin, Bishop, the
Pack-Simpson bunch, etc., who repre–
sent the academically condoned poetry
of the '50's. But I wish to say em–
phatically that from this entire group
of poets (which represents almost twen–
ty years of poetry) we have about five
pop.ms of note. . . .
The Beat Generation, while not a
mo\'ement as such, is a definite reac–
tion to the void [of the '40's]. To deny
the obvious immaturity and ingenuous
Guality of a good bit of the literature
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