Early critical reviews and studies of literature of the Beat Movement defined Beat literature narrowly as referring almost exclusively to the works of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and the very early New York Beats. Later "New American Poetry" developed into a broader term including a much wider range of writers beyond the early Beats. Now, one of the appeals of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology was that it reprinted Ginsberg's Howl for the first time in an anthology. And Allen included Jack Kerouac's poetry, not yet well-known (Choruses from Mexico City Blues).
But Allen's anthology considered the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance as all being part of the same movement. Through the years and with the regular issuing of anthologies and critical studies combining all the elements of the innovative literary movement, as opposed to the established and accepted canon, and with the huge increase in studies in the literature of the Beat Movement since the 1980s, the poets of all these factions: San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, New York School, City Lights poets have all been jumbled up in many minds anyway as part of the Beat Movement. Thus writers such as Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, or Frank O'Hara, all of whom at one point or another distanced themselves from the early Beats, nevertheless today can be considered part of the Beat Movement as much as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Eckbert Faas even attempts to place the establishment poet Robert Bly among the New American poets and, thus, the Beats.
The Beats were always included in that label, the New American Poets . Values of the 1950s New Critics such as self-containment, tension, irony, metaphor, or complexity of form are not values held by New American Poets. Their poetry is as free as the lifestyle it reflects.
Be sure to follow The Scene: Radical Poetics from the ZigZag Edges.
By Paul Varner in Beat Movement, New American Poetry, Series, The New American Poetry 1945-1960 on October 3, 2017 .