Cultural Shift through the Eyes of Ginsberg and Kerouac :: Allen Ginsberg

Cultural Shift by dint of the look of Ginsberg and Kerouac Brothers of the San Francisco Beat scene, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg lived in the midst of a consumer cultural revolution, patriots of a forgotten mindset. While the regional characters of the estate were quickly being equalise by television, Kerouac and Ginsberg wrote poetry and prose that both captured and contemplated the moment. They were contemporaries, sharing the said(prenominal) circle of friends and rough drawing from the same influences but produced works seeking divergent means to the same conceptual end. Kerouac wrote with an enlightened nostalgia, fascinated with preserving a form of the pioneer intuitive feeling of individuals and tall tales in the midst of cultural change, while Ginsbergs poetry at a time criticized the shortcomings and decay of society neither author completing the picture or the message, leaving something for the other. the Statesn culture of the mid nineteen fifties and proto( prenominal) sixties is described with disgust and rejection in both Kerouacs and Ginsbergs works. They bore watch to and documented a rich, variant culture homogenized and sterilized by Dial television ads and The Saturday Evening Post. Beat calls to rebellion and cancerous hoary images show America on the decline and readying for revolution. In Kerouacs impudent The Dharma Bums, Japhys ideal revolutionary rejects the new developments of American culture, refusing to subscribe to the general direct that they consume production, and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that constitute they didnt really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general scrap you finally always see a week later in the garage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume...(97). Their America was a land of mass-marketed uselessness. At a time when stores across the nation carried ide ntical products, and everybody saw the same three channels of television, the sparkle of regional character started to evaporate. Kerouac paints his Dharma Bums as the heirs of Whitman, poetic thoughtful wanderers. Ginsberg also used Whitman to connector the recent to the present in the poem A Supermarket in calcium, asking the bard Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, well both be lonely. / Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?