Spontaneous Overflow

Ezra Pound, in his ABC of Reading, mentions the sort of direct treatment of the thing that he always meant for literature. He believes that when asked about something’s whatness, we usually give descriptions that turn the thing (which is already known to us) into something abstract (that we can barely identify.) He mentions the example of the fish and the student who writes a four-page essay about the fish, bringing lots and lots of abstract terms to describe it. (Pound 17-9)He believes that science only started to progress when Bacon suggested the direct examination of things (Pound 20). He mentions that the proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual comparison of one slide or specimen with another (Pound 17).Later in this book, he goes on to praise Chinese ideograph as a way of direct examination . He brings up examples of how direct their ideograph is and how unnecessary it is for the ideograph to mention useless descriptions (Pound 21).This method of direct treatment of things was later taken on by many writers and poets, who tried to excel at this method and be as direct as they can. But amongst all of them, one stands out.Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, I daresay, is a Haiku poet whose poems are as long as a novel. He is one of the main members of the inner beat circle with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. As a member of the Beat Generation, he follows the path set by Ginsberg, meaning that he is as norm-breaking as any other Beat writer. This paper’s main concern, then, will be a brief introduction of the Beat Generation and next to that, a detailed explanation of Kerouac’s world, by analyzing a few of his novels.