ck after his freshman year because they thought that he was sleeping with other men, he realized the life of an intellectual was not appealing to him; he wanted to live life, not think about it, so he moved to Joan Vollmers apartment.He immediately moved into Joan Vollmers apartment, eager to begin an education that required firsthand knowledge acquired from experience, as opposed to the conventional wisdom that had been handed down, only to be moderately contested by academics, from century to century. (Schumacher 55) He needed a new purpose in life besides the classic theme of events where a person goes to school, gets a job and dies.After realizing that life had a different meaning to him, Allen started playing with lifes constraints. He did not want to only write poetry in classical verse form, rather he wanted to express his feelings in his own way and not by recognized standards set by society. This shift in thinking is best represented by his poem, "Death In Violence." It was a prose poem written about the conflict between what society is and whom people want to be. This poem set the mood and thought for the rising Beat Generation.The "Beat Generation" was the name to the youths of the 1950s. Todays society would dream them as a group of slackers who did not like to work, and wasted life; nevertheless, these "Beats" whole purpose was to live life in any type of manor. From drug use to driving across America, they tried to find purpose. Working till their death did not seem acceptable or productive to them. They became studies of life, and for their enjoyment, they intellectualized about life and took occurrences in life as a symbol to something more meaningful. Jack Kerouac sums this up in one of his quotes from On the Road.We seek to find new phrases; we writhe and twist and blow; every now and then a clear harmonic cry gives us new suggestions of a tune, a thought, that will someday be the only tune and thought in the...
