Professor Robert Barsky
ENGL 288  03, "Special Topics: Romantics to the Beat Generation"

This course will explore the influence that Romantic poets, notably Lord Byron, and P.B. Shelley, had upon Beat Generation poets and writers. We will begin by discussing some of the seminal works in Romantic poetry, including Keats’s and Wordsworth’s descriptions of their poetic ambitions and projects, and we’ll then turn to some of the characteristics of the literature and politics of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a range of women writers of the Beat Generation including Diane DiPrima and Anne Waldman. We will undertake our reading under the assumption that there was something profoundly liberating in such works as the “Lyrical Ballads” and, moreover, in the comical and irreverent masterpiece by Lord Byron, Don Juan, which served as impetuses for the kinds of work we found in post-war American Beats. This course will offer students the opportunity to study but also to create their own creative work, if they so desire, as a means of exploring first hand the creative process inspired through the genius and the generosity of these writers.
 
Texts: (available in the bookstore; most of these texts can also be found on the web)
Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review
The Beat Book
Women of the Beat Generation
The Portable Beat Reader

Reading assignments, week-by-week:
1. The Poetic Ambitions of the Romantics
2. Lord Byron’s Approach
3. From the Romantics to the Beats, Influence and Expansion
4. Allen Ginsberg, in Beat Writers at Work, Beat Down to your Soul and The Beat Book.
5. Neil Cassady and William Burroughs in Beat Writers at Work, Beat Down to your Soul and The Beat Book.
6. Gregory Corso in Beat Writers at Work, Beat Down to your Soul and The Beat Book.
7. Jack Kerouac in Beat Writers at Work, Beat Down to your Soul and The Beat Book.
8.  Diane Di Prima in The Beat Book, Beat Down to your Soul and Women of the Beat Generation.
9. Joanne Kyger and Denise Levertov in The Beat Book, Beat Down to your Soul and Women of the Beat Generation.
10. Amiri Baraka in The Beat Book and Beat Down to your Soul.
11. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat Writers at Work, The Beat Book and Beat Down to your Soul.
12. Lenore Kandel, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley in Beat Writers at Work, The Beat Book and Beat Down to your Soul.
13. Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, Beat Writers at Work and The Beat Book.
14. Conclusions. 
 
 
Video and Audio Materials:  [*optional, for those interested in the works from a performance perspective]
 Pull my daisy [videorecording] / directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie ; written and narrated by Jack Kerouac.
Video McLuhan [videorecording] / written & narrated by Tom Wolfe.
Kerouac [videorecording] / a film by John Antonelli
The Beat Generation [videorecording]/ a film by Janet Forman
Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds, by Donstanzo Allione
Growing Up in America: The Sixties – Then and Now [videorecording]
Allen Ginsberg’s poetry [audio]