![]() 9), pointing out that Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s fatalist social attitude was at odds with their professed politics. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. It expands on Beat scholar John Tytell’s comment that the group’s faith in self-even societal-liberation through art was tempered by ‘a Spenglerian expectation of the total breakdown of Western culture’ (1976. It shows that a movement intended to revive Walt Whitman’s humanistic and democratic agenda was profoundly influenced by pessimistic modernist sources-from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to early twentieth-century German apocalyptic historian Oswald Spengler. Using Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody (written 1958, published 1972) and Tristessa (1960) and Allen Ginsberg’s poems ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’ (19), this chapter explores the dissonance between Romantic American and reactionary European impulses in the Beat Generation.
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