Beats and the Historical Avant-Garde

The basis of avant-garde poetry is to break away from tradition. From Gertrude Stein to Emmett Williams and many others, avant-garde poetry has been about breaking the boundaries of lyrical poetry. Beat poets took that idea one step further. Beat poetry did not include much radical use of form like the Concrete poets did, or radical use of words like Stein did but where they were radical was in their content. Beat poets pushed boundaries with their provocative and explosive content and language. They very much wrote in a stream of consciousness style rather than meticulously choosing every word. They frequently wrote what immediately came to mind and to them those natural first thoughts had more meaning than what a poet could come up with through grueling revision, which was what traditional poets thought was most important. There have been several different movements that have been called avant-garde and so it is hard to give it a concrete definition but the Oxford dictionary defines avant-garde as: new and unusual or experimental ideas, especially in the arts, or the people introducing them. The Beat Generation and Beat poetry can be perfectly described by the words new, unusual and experimental. The obscenity trial that came out of the publication of Ginsberg's "Howl" is a perfect example of this. Several well-respected writers came out in support of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. When they won the case it became much more acceptable for writers to be free in their writing, to write about topics that might be considered a bit taboo but only because tradition dictated that they couldn't be spoken about publicly, sex is one big example of this. All of the avant-garde movements studied in this class have been about pushing boundaries to create something new, to dig deeper and deeper into the truth and to do that in several new and creative ways and that is what Beat poetry is all about.