The Beat writers represent the decline of American Literature.

The Beat writers represent the decline of American literature. The Modernist writers before them overshadow them totally. Nobody could sanely choose Ginsberg over Eliot, Kerouac over Hemingway, or Burroughs over Beckett. Burroughs and his lot wrote nothing remarkable. I truly mean this. I hate the Beat generation. Whenever someone attempts to compare Ginsberg to Blake I want to throw up. I go to a cafe regularly where I see really old folks who occasionally mention the Beat writers and cringe inside. I don’t think we have been a literary nation (America) since about the 1970s and I think that’s because the Beat Generation wrote the first garbage. For example, Howl is an illiterate’s idea of Whitman’s Song of Myself. Kerouac probably wrote On The Road the way with a copy of The Sun Also Rises next to him, the same way Pascal wrote Pensees with a copy of Montaigne’s Essais by his side.

I’m not joking when I say the Beat writers were garbage. They wrote garbage and it wasn’t even memorable garbage. They’re responsible for the fall of American literature.