Poets on Film: 5 Signs You Might Be a Beat Poet Trapped in a Biopic

Would you rather be reading Yeats and smoking cigarettes than going to class? You might be a genius, or you might be trapped in the sexy, stylish, and bewildering Kill Your Darlings (2013).

Poets on Film is a semi-regular feature of PopPoetry, a poetry and pop culture Substack written by Caitlin Cowan. You can learn more about it here. Check out the archive to see other TV shows, movies, and films whose intersections with poetry I’ve covered. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, subscribe so you won’t miss a post!

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I’m always looking for comments and suggestions for future posts, and today’s post about the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings was requested by reader Siddhi Shah. Thank you for the recommendation, Siddhi! If there’s a piece of pop culture the features poetry or poets that you’d like to see me cover, leave a comment and I just might do it! :)

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From left to right, Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr, Michael C. Hall as David Kammerer, Elizabeth Olson as Edie Parker, and Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg in Jordan Krokidas’s Kill Your Darlings (via Empire)

You know the Beats. Even if you don’t know the Beats, you know them:

• The names: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs

• The works: On the Road, Howl, Naked Lunch

• The stereotype: Drugs & cigarettes, jazz, turtlenecks, bongos, dark glasses

The Beat poets are often conflated with the “beatnik” stereotype that cropped up in mainstream media in the decade or two following their initial activity. At a time of rigid conformity, the Beats arose at a time when a counterculture was developing In some ways, the Beats were the harbingers of the mass counterculture that would take hold in America in the 1960s.

Some of the scorn aimed at the Beats was undoubtedly an attempt to quash the ideals that the movement stood for. But the drugs and sex and boundary crashing of their lifestyle were equally upsetting to the mainstream, too. As Matt Theado wrote in his book The Beats: A Literary Reference—