“Stranger, Stranger, strange, did you believe me?”
This line could have been his epitaph.
XXVIII
The beat generation did not
suppose the existence of a God or
higher power. A famous poet who did
was Keats. It is fair to say that the
concept of God became secularised
with the romantic poets who followed
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, Byron
etc… virtually to disappear with the
20 th -century wave of modernist poets
Olsen, Stevens, Carlos Williams,
Pound etc… The beat generation was
styled upon a kind of freedom which
pre-empted, though only mildly
influenced, the 60's civil rights and
"Hippie Movement". Based on this
movement was a blind belief in
freedom. While philosophers from
Augustine to Aquinas had postulated
upon free will, Immanuel Kant was
the first to suppose the independent
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