Introduction: Romanticism, Humanism and the Counterculture
The Beat Generation, a literary movement with unprecedented popular cultural impact, is easily and usually understood as Romantic and humanistic. Beginning with a statement of affinity by its main progenitor Allen Ginsberg for the modernist fascist-sympat
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Introduction: Romanticism, Humanism and the Counterculture
No Bob Dylan Without Ezra Pound In 1975, Allen Ginsberg, Beat poet and elder statesman of what had recently been christened the counterculture, gave a lecture on modern poetry to students at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, Colorado. ‘I would venture to say’, Ginsberg told his audience, ‘that there would have been no Bob Dylan without Ezra Pound’ (Staff 2017). On the face of it, it was an unlikely and provocative connection for Ginsberg to have made. In style and politics, Pound represented much of what the Beat Generation and its literary descendants purported to stand against. His were the aesthetics of ‘concrete’ precision not freeform expression, of modernising through engagement with tradition rather than the radical renunciation promoted by the Beats. Moreover, Pound’s early twentieth-century movement—born in London in the runup to First World War and including T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the philosopher-poet T.E. Hulme—was by 1975 synonymous with a right- wing politics entirely contrary to the social and political ideologies Ginsberg—and certainly Bob Dylan—adhered to. From Eliot’s conservative Anglo-Catholicism to Hulme’s, Lewis’ and Pound’s flirtations with fascism, these so-called Men of 1914 practised a public politics that in the post-Second World War West marked them out as relics of the dark and not-so-distant past.1 Add to this that Ginsberg and Dylan were both Jewish, that Pound, Eliot and Lewis had tolerated and at points promoted anti-Semitism, and that Pound had been exposed very © The Author(s) 2020 G. Stevenson, Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47760-8_1
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publically for siding with Mussolini during the war, and the genealogy sounds even less tenable. Crowds like the one Ginsberg addressed at Naropa were used to hearing Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Blake cited as Romantic, democratic influences on the Beat movement, and were no doubt puzzled by his claim of kinship with a poet whose public image screamed elitist obscurantism and fascist anti-Semitism. And yet that statement of affinity is critical to a proper understanding not only of Ginsberg as poet but about the post-Second World War movement he came to signify. Apart from Pound’s anomalous but very real poetic influence on late twentieth-century American letters, it speaks to a connection where most see a rupture between early century European modernism and the youth rebellion that emerged across the United States after 1945. This book is an attempt to understand that connection, to understand the Beat Generation and the literary counterculture it spawned as products rather than straightforward reactions against the philosophy and politics of writers like Pound, Eliot and Lewis—writers whose own rebellions were centred on the tiredness of standard humanist and Romantic traditions. In the popular and academic imagination, those traditions are exactly what Ginsberg,
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