In the middle of 1956, Gary Snyder—who was studying Zen Buddhism in Japan—asked Allen Ginsberg for “a concise statement of [his] theory of beatness.” Snyder then gave his own not-so-concise definition:

Beatness is a quality of the world that turns some people nuts, or to stone, or warps them, and for all the suffering men go through, precious little is learned—so the Buddhist shot and Zen in particular—is not to do away with suffering (an impossibility—in summer we sweat, in winter we shiver—that’s all), but to make suffering flower into insight and beauty instead of dry you up and make you numb.

Ginsberg did not respond directly (at least not in surviving letters) because his mother died and he was stuck at sea, unable to return for her funeral. However, given that “Howl” made him a literary celebrity later that year, he was pushed to define “Beat” on many occasions in the next four decades.

The word seems to have originated in the black/jazz community in the early part of the 20th century and then found its way into the vocabularies of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs in the mid-forties, seemingly introduced by Herbert Huncke. Ginsberg used it in a poem as early as the middle of 1945 and Kerouac expanded it to “Beat Generation” a few years later.

Although it came to define a literary movement, it originally referred to a state of being. When Kerouac expanded it to refer to a generation, that is also what he had in mind, though he expanded it to have a more spiritual dimension. By the mid-fifties, when Snyder was asking Ginsberg for a definition, it was clearly evolving into a term for those whose situation pushed them towards artistic creation. Snyder went on in his letter:

in America all that’s really sweet and creative now is coming out of the beat ones, i.e. you have nothing and become nothing and you create! Because what else can you create out of, but nothing?

After the “Howl” obscenity trial and the release of On the Road, Herb Caen coined the term “beatnik” and that largely stuck in the public mind. It became a convenient term for any young, strange, and potentially delinquent person. It sparked a media frenzy that faded but then was replaced a decade later by “hippie” to much the same end.

Ginsberg once defined “Beat” as being an attitude:

There is not beat poetry, or a beat novel, or beat painting. Beat is a poetic conception, an attitude toward the world.

But then elsewhere he contradicted himself:

the whole scene is strictly a literary scene, basically, with technical literary practical meanings

It is no surprise then that a precise definition is elusive even now. The people who we now think of as part of the Beat Generation had different personalities, politics, interests, and artistic styles. They weren’t even a generation, for that matter. When we scrutinise their definitions, we can see disagreement and uncertainty.

Perhaps the truth is somewhere between all of the above or perhaps it is merely a fool’s errand to neatly categorise people under generational and literary labels. I think, though, that one of the better explanations comes from a man who repeatedly claimed he wasn’t a Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He once said that it was little more than an extended social group:

The Beat Generation was just Allen Ginsberg’s friends.

I have attempted to unpick the various definitions of “Beat” here: beatdom.com/what-is-beat

Perhaps the article linked below is also of interest… It shows how prior to the term “beatnik,” which brought together “beat” and “sputnik,” one reporter attempted to do the same but ended up with the term “Beep Generation.”

Photo (of Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Timothy Leary) by Harold Adler