“Dadaists, absurdists, surrealists had always believed that by striking an alternative aesthetic, by taking alternative pleasures, or by undermining the classical mode of representational painting, or establishing harmonic structures in music, by this you could change the face of society. What happened with the beats was that by merging this transformation of standards and aesthetic pleasure with an actual attack on political structures you effect a sort of non-specific revolution, which was not programmed, which was not dictated and didn’t have an alternative set of rules. You’d scrapped the old rules and now, hopefully, a new set of rules would evolve from a way of life that had been established according to human pleasure and generosity. It erupted, I would say, with Allen Ginbserg’s “Howl.”

— Jeff Nuttall (from “Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961-71,” an invaluable oral history of the era collected and edited by Jonathan Green)