The Poetry of the Beats

“We have seen the familiar room grow unfamiliar,” T. S. Eliot wrote in The Fall of the City. It is the modern poet’s task to restore that familiarity. His tools are a disciplined sensibility, the sense of form, and the response to tradition. Of these, the most important is the disciplined sensibility, for it channels the sense of form and prevents the traditional response from becoming rampant epigonism. The poets of the Beat generation have rejected both discipline and sensibility by perverting the ars poetica into a series of noisy orgasms. Very appropriately, one of their literary magazines is called Howl—delibererately suggesting a dog sitting on its haunches and serenading the full moon.

If five of the outstanding Beat poets were locked in a room with orders to write a sonnet—and if the smell did not overpower them—they might be able to recall some high-school knowledge of meter, rhyme scheme, and the arrangement of lines. But it would be in the nature of a miracle if even one of them realized that the inner logic of a sonnet is utterly different from that of any other verse form. And they would be astonished to learn that some of E. E. Cummings’ most typographically eccentric poems are correct exercises in this traditional form. For the Beat poets have convinced themselves that poetry must be a combination of nausea and the stirrings of the urino-genital tract.

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Ralph de Toledano

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“We have seen the familiar room grow unfamiliar,” T. S. Eliot wrote in The Fall of the City. It is the modern poet’s task to restore that familiarity. His tools are a disciplined sensibility, the sense of form, and the response to tradition. Of these, the most important is the disciplined sensibility, for it channels the sense of form and prevents the traditional response from becoming rampant epigonism. The poets of the Beat generation have rejected both discipline and sensibility by perverting the ars poetica into a series of noisy orgasms. Very appropriately, one of their literary magazines is called Howl—delibererately suggesting a dog sitting on its haunches and serenading the full moon.

If five of the outstanding Beat poets were locked in a room with orders to write a sonnet—and if the smell did not overpower them—they might be able to recall some high-school knowledge of meter, rhyme scheme, and the arrangement of lines. But it would be in the nature of a miracle if even one of them realized that the inner logic of a sonnet is utterly different from that of any other verse form. And they would be astonished to learn that some of E. E. Cummings’ most typographically eccentric poems are correct exercises in this traditional form. For the Beat poets have convinced themselves that poetry must be a combination of nausea and the stirrings of the urino-genital tract.