The main literary influences on the Beat writers were Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Blake in particular was the most influential Romantic poet, especially in inspiring Ginsberg. He once had an auditory hallucination where he heard Blake reading and this heavily influenced him throughout the rest of his life. Ginsberg agreed in particular with Blake’s view that everything is holy and divine.
Blake’s poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the idea behind the Beat vision. "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite"; that if we just opened our eyes, we would see that everything is beatific and everything is holy.
Transcendentalism derives from human spirituality and the individual soul responding to the larger spirit of nature. In Naked Angels Tytell writes that Walt Whitman was one of these writers who in his poetry was "optimistically proclaiming with egalitarian gusto the raw newness and velocity of self-renewing change in America while joyously admiring the potential of the common man". The "common man" is divine and capable of changing society.
The Fellaheen
In Spengler’s book The Decline of the West, he writes that History goes in cycles and all civilisations eventually decline. His view was that society was entering into the final phase of its downfall. As civilisation declines, so grows a minority group who have an alternative vision. These are the "fellaheen", the dispossessed who have seen through civilisation and don’t want to conform to it, instead looking for a spiritual alternative.
This was the counterculture of the 1960’s. They were opposed to materialism, militarism and consumerism, believing instead that by opening your mind you can see that everything in life is divine. Because of their different views they were seen as mad and often ended up in mental institutes and prisons, ridiculed by their critics and censored by their publishers. They were sincere about all aspects of their lives, including homosexuality at a time when it was viewed as perverse, and drugs which they claimed were taken in order to widen their perceptions.
Inspiration From the East
The writers turned to the East for inspiration. Tytell writes that the appeal of Zen was in "the denial of all value judgement: nothing was more sacred or less holy than anything else". This compassion interested the Beats, and helped them to disassociate themselves from the West. However, they still had strong beliefs in other religions; Kerouac was brought up with Christianity and Ginsberg with Judaism.
When Kerouac came across Buddhism he explained it to Ginsberg. Ginsberg was attracted to Zen because of it showing a new way of seeing the world, and became a devoted Tibetan Buddhist after being tutored by his mentor, a monk called Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
These influences can be seen throughout the writers pieces of literature, for example in Ginsberg's poem 'Howl' and Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums.
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