Birth of the Cool: African American Culture and the Beat Identity

Abstract

The nativity of Jazz poetry was in ‘jive’ or the language of the coloured enslaved Americans, who were forced to learn a foreign language; however these ‘Black’ Americans, found a new form of expression and handled the English language in their own style, Jive was the end result of such an experiment. Even before the Civil war and years after it, these coloured people used jive, to express their pent up feelings amongst themselves, their language became more explosive and provocative and this is what came to be known as the ‘jive’ or ‘hip’ language. My paper focuses on the influence of Jive and Jazz lingo on the Beat Poets movement.