La Vie Boheme

"Compassion, to fashion, to passion when it's new/ To Sontag/ To Sondheim/ To anything taboo

Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage/ Lenny Bruce/ Langston Hughes"

For those of you who have not had the pleasure of seeing the musical RENT, in the song "La Vie Boheme", the above are people listed in the song La Vie Boheme as people who inspire the Bohemianism. A song dedicated to expression, freedom, and art.

This is not the only reference to beat poets in newer media. Even the Gilmore Girls had casually placed argument between teenagers about whether the beat writers inspired "ordinary" people to see things from a different point of view, or if they were simply drunk, lazy, petty thieves. (Fun fact: a copy of "Howl and Other Poems" is the first book Jess borrows from Rory.)

From Sontag to Hughes, these men seem only to be connected in La Vie Boheme because they make music or write poetry or are novelists; perhaps, those who were able to capture "passion when it's new." The connections between Ginsberg and Dylan have been explained to us a thousand times, but what I am going to attempt is proving to you why Sondheim and Ginsberg should be mentioned together a lot more frequently.

I'm not arguing that these two would have been best friends forever– they'd probably hate each other– but a lot of their thoughts on writing are eerily similar, a poet and a composer speaking through the years to each other. To Ginsberg's “Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness", Sondheim agrees "The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper." They both believe in the power of art to change people and society, especially when it comes to poetry and music.

Ginsberg wrote about the madness of his generation, that poetry was the only way "people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private," argued that every person had flowers of poetry inside of them, thoughts rolling around their heads, and holiness and desire in their hearts. Sondheim once said "The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them"– in the same way Ginsberg was upset that America takes people and turns them into workers and slaves to the idea of an "American dream", Sondheim is upset that America makes people out as not being able to understand things and that art is being changed to be simple and is making people think simpler in response.

At the heart of both these men is passion, and a desire for other people to follow the passion inside themselves as well.