Introduction
After World War II, the American society was the scenery of a contrast between a sense of Americanism represented by winning the war, technology and mass production, and a feeling of Americanism that placed its roots in ethnic diversity and dialog –dialog in all senses.
A group of the society, mainly artists from different disciplines, definitively did not agree with the model of America proposed by the mainstream. Among them, Jazz musicians redefined the genre and developed one of the most revolutionary musical kinds of the twentieth century: bebop, which influenced not only music, but also literature.
Writers in the movement known as the Beat Generation took bebop composition techniques as their main source to create their literature. Writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others, developed and applied different writing techniques based on jazz improvisation. Out of these poets, Jack Kerouac was the one who worked in depth on the creation of a technique based on jazz phrasing. The principles of his technique were published in 1953 under the title of Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.
The present paper analyzes the rhythmic features of the piece October in the Railroad Earth (1953) by Jack Kerouac in relation to jazz composition as an assessment of his time.
To achieve this, a parallel of the basics of the study of rhythm in music and poetry was made. Thus, it was possible to recognize and characterize the rhythmical features of the poem and to look for their correspondence with jazz composition techniques.
The result of such an analysis shows how rhythm in the piece embodies the valuation made by Kerouac and how jazz composition elements allow him to make a strong critique of his time.