Thanks benallenvevoda for the post. Making a rational defining beatniks is an interesting idea for this class. Last week I bought Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind. In it Ferlinghetti gives a very short introduction to his poems which reads:

The title of this book is taken from Henri Miller's INTO THE NIGHT LIFE. It is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them - as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

It's not a rational definition of Beats my any means, but it gives you a sense of Ferlinghetti's mentality when it comes to his poetry at that time. The first poem in his book may help us understand what he might mean:

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see

the people of the world

exactly at the moment when

they first attained the title of

‘suffering humanity’

They writhe upon the page

in a veritable rage

of adversity

Heaped up

groaning with babies and bayonets

under cement skies

in an abstract landscape of blasted trees

bent statues bats wings and beaks

slippery gibbets

cadavers and carnivorous cocks

and all the final hollering monsters

of the

‘imagination of disaster’

they are so bloody real

it is as if they really still existed

And they do

Only the landscape is changed

They still are ranged along the roads

plagued by legionnaires

false windmills and demented roosters

They are the same people

only further from home

on freeways fifty lanes wide

on a concrete continent

spaced with bland billboards

illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

The scene shows fewer tumbrils

but more strung-out citizens

in painted cars

and they have strange license plates

and engines

that devour America

The reference in the first line is to Francisco de Goya. Take a look at some of his paintings and the mention of 'suffering humanity' makes more sense. See A Lunatic behind Bars, A Pilgrimage to San Isidro, and The Madhouse especially. Ferlinghetti uses this imagery to show, in a way, how the Beats feel about the society they live in, or at least how Ferlinghetti feels about it.