It seemed entirely possible the newness and openness expressed in the poems, the paintings, the music, would ripple out far beyond St. Marks Place and the tables in the Cedar, swamping the old barriers of class and race, healing the tragic divisions in the American soul. Children of the late and silent fifties, we knew little of political realities. We had the illusion our own passions were enough. We felt, as Hettie Cohen Jones once put it, that you could change everything just by being loud enough.
