I Watched the documentary film of HOWL and although i didn't study the BEAT POETS i was inspired by his themes and language. I was more into SYLVIA PLATH AND ANN SEXTON.
The Beat Generation, or Beat poets as some were called, embraced the bleak urban landscapes and pockets of poverty and despair of people living outside mainstream culture. They were a generation that felt they could never settle into the lives of corporate jobs and nuclear families -- ordinarily the ideal of men of the post-war era. They longed for a more "real" America with people truer to the land or to a kind of homespun cultural heritage that seemed somehow lost. Other Beat writers simply longed for a cultural space in which to exist where the conformity of society was never an issue. Ginsberg's poetry, for example, deals with the tensions between rural ideals of the American Romantic poets and the reality of poverty, industrialization, and urban blight that faced maligned urban groups in the mid-twentieth century. Ginsberg, like his fellow Beat poets, felt that he simply could not belong in modern America. [GRADESAVER}