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2 results

  • Chapter 12 - The Counterculture and the Culture of Money

  • from Part II - Histories
  • Edited by Paul Crosthwaite, University of Edinburgh
  • Book:
    Money and American Literature
    Published online:
    03 July 2025
    Print publication:
    17 July 2025, pp 207-222

  • Summary

    By the mid-twentieth century, for those on the political Left, America had spawned a purely competitive, morally and spiritually debased, money-oriented culture. Inspiring a diverse range of responses, this American culture of money was a central ideological target of 1960s-era activism, alongside interrelated concerns with industrialization, the nuclear threat, the Vietnam War and American interventionism abroad, racism, and environmental degradation. Some counterculture groups adopted explicitly anti-money doctrines and actively sought to build functioning communities outside of the money economy; for others, poverty was associated with spiritual plenitude, or was a secondary symptom of a desire to be free of all responsibilities and entanglements; still others critiqued capitalism’s role in structural oppression. This chapter explores the diversity of such responses, as illustrated in political and literary works of the period, and registers the extent to which countercultural criticism of the culture of money was not without its compromises, inconsistencies, and (apparent) hypocrisies.

  • Chapter 41 - The 1970s and the “Poetry of the Center”

  • from Part IV - Beyond Modernism: American Poetry, 1950–2000
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 937-958

  • Summary

    In the 1950s San Francisco acquired a reputation, which it has since maintained, as a mecca for poetry. In the popular imagination, San Francisco poetry is synonymous with the beat Movement, which first rose to prominence there. This chapter presents the salient features of milieu and then discusses what have been seen as the two strains within it, the spontaneous and the hermetic. Making a virtue of eschewing fame, the hermetic wing turned inward, viewing the scene of writing as akin to magic, in which spirits might direct the making of poetry, and addressing the poem principally to a group of like-minded initiates. In addition to spiritualistic composition and a penchant for occult sources, such as the Grail myth or the tarot deck, there are two other strikingly hermetic qualities to Spicer's oeuvre. The other hermetic aspect of Spicer's poetry involves his relationship to language.