by Casper Reaves

Created on: August 16, 2011

The poetry movements known as the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation revolve around three key poets.  Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsburg.  Not only did they contribute to the poetry, they held a large role as leaders in the poetry from 1940’s to the 1960’s.  Not only did they influence poetry in San Francisco, but poetry throughout the United States.

One of the seminal anthologies of this poetry is The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen.  Two of the divisions in the collection are San Francisco Renaissance and The Beat Generation.  Allen set the peak time of the first group as 1947 to 1949 and the second group was most active in San Francisco in 1956. 

Ferlinghetti was the co-founder of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and later City Lights Press.  Both institutions were tightly connected to the poetry of that time.  Rexroth moved to the city in 1927 and supported many of the younger poets who came to the city later.  In particular, he organized the 1958 poetry reading where Ginsburg read “Howl.”  This reading put the Beat Poets on the national stage.

Even thought they have numerous influences and trends, these movements had two major aspects.  First, the poetics moved away from “academic poetry.”  In an essay, Renaissance poet Robert Duncan wrote “a longing grows to return to the open composition in which the accidents and imperfections of speech might awake intimations of human beings.”  Rexroth described his poetry and other works as “a revolt against rhetoric and symbolism in poetry, a return to direct statement, simple clear images, unpretentious themes, fidelity to objectively verifiable experience, strict avoidance of sentimentality.”

Throughout these movements, the poetry contains a wealth of powerful images and honesty.  One of the San Francisco Renaissance Poet, Bruce Boyd, reflected upon poetry in his work, “Venice Recalled.”
     & the poem, what it means to say,
     for the natural motion of its body, is the clearer
     that remarks the wider movement of its actual thought.
In particular, the Beat Poets emphasized actual thoughts, with many works containing stream of consciousness.

The second major aspect of the poetry of this time in San Francisco is the reflection and rejection of the

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