Irreverence, not piety, seems like the perfect sentiment to characterize the Beats. And yet, strangely enough, piety -- dictionary-defined for our purposes as awe, godliness, sanctity, holiness -- is precisely what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the twin pillars of Beat sensibility, were most about. Some younger admirers don't like to admit that sarcasm was mainly not in the Beat repertoire; sacredness was. When Ginsberg wrote "Poet is Priest!" he damn well meant it. Kerouac would have loathed the bashing mentality behind "gangsta" rap.

Embarked on a serious quest for "angelic-ness" and "holiness," the Beats cherished life, bowed to sunflowers. They were "holy fools." Kerouac wrestled his entire life with Catholicism and Buddhism respectively and merged the two into his own form of personal spirituality. He wrote learned Buddhist tracts and was an old-fashioned American patriot as well, full of deep feeling for this country.

Ginsberg, of course, was a fiery rebel after Blake, whom he claimed, along with Whitman, as his progenitors. And he had deep roots in the Jewish prophetic tradition of the Old Testament, which informs his most famous work, "Howl," while "Kaddish," perhaps his most brilliant poem, is composed after the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Like Kerouac, he, too, ventured wholeheartedly into Buddhism, establishing a disciplined, lifelong practice.

Last, each man was a devotee of great books and could cite long lists of influences ranging from Whitman, Balzac, Wolfe, Hardy and Melville to Ryokan, Lao-Tze, Cummings, Neruda and Dante. They lived and breathed High Literature, even as they tore it down. You could sense literary echoes in every rhapsodic line they wrote.

In other words, as we used to say in the Bronx, these were not airheads but very serious guys.

Alan Kaufman