Although the Beat Generation seemed to explode without warning on the American literary horizon, it can be seen retrospectively as a period whose characteristic elements had been present since the early part of the century. Moreover, the richness and integrity of the Beat Generation as a literary movement is evidenced by the wide range of styles and expressions it embraces while retaining as its single goal the liberation of mind, body, and word.

John Wieners's poetry is singular among the Beats for its quiet elegance and understatement. Absent is the flamboyant use of language or furious expression common among his contemporaries who sought a kind of literary parallel to the chaotic artfulness of bebop jazz and the monumental canvases of action painters such as Jackson Pollock. His is a poetry slow and deliberate--hermetic, even--striving always to impose an order of the mind upon an impinging chaos. John Wieners...