Class Notes Friday Jan. 20th

Beat Poetry

- Disorienting, stream of conscience

- tradition and convention

Modernism - mourned loss of tradition

Beat - "trashed tradition"

- experimental

- pessimistic/cynical

- raw emotion

- Not as elite as Modernism

Beats establish a counterculture

- asserting your eccentricities

- alternative

- oppositional

- point out homogeneity (sameness)

- individuality

- proto hippie

- drugs

- more open

- drugs

- sex

- homosexuality

- other religions/spirituality

- other cultures

Howl

- Howl describes "destroyed minds". similar to Hallow Men

- More descriptive than Hollow Men

- more visual

- Written in 1950's

- Red Scare

- paranoia, fear of communists

- witch hunt for communists, protecting yourself as well

- conformity, suburban, middle class

- opposite of communism, materialism, capitalism, religion, patriotism

- Who's destroyed?

- Moloch

- pagan deity, parents sacrificed children

- in modern day, great minds that didn't fit were sacrificed

- Moloch = capitalism, war, suburbs

- artists

- suicides

- mental illness, institutionalized

- Police presence, pressure to conform, being watched