Beat Generation essay 1.8 | Page 44

choice and Gunn is the "mediator of this exposition. This is an ASC (altered style of communication) of the shaman's performance which Gunn uses, often through rhyme to accentuate a definitive point. After all, death is omnipresent "I watch the progress of the plague (The Missing). Gunn is the definitive existential shaman-poet. X Kenneth Rexroth introduced poet Allen Ginsberg and others at the famous six gallery meeting. He writes in the tradition of “contemplative, mystical, visionary, philosophical and prophetic poets such as Yeats, Lawrence, Whitman, Blake, Du Fu, Motokiyo and Sappho” (Reisman, 2012). He deals with themes of "erotic mysticism" and "Ecstatic transcendence". He is fundamentally a poet, nevertheless, the shaman bears an important relation to the aetiology of poesy. Eliade tells us, in defining the shaman, that the shaman "may have a guardian spirit present in the form of an animal or person of another sex". This forms part of the mystical love presented in 43