Word: yawping
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Jack Kerouac's "barbaric yawp" broke into the American consciousness in the middle years of Eisenhower. At roughly the same time, Marlon Brando, adenoidal and inarticulately glowering, careered through adolescent daydreams astride a Harley-Davidson. From the perspective of the late '60s, the old rebellions and spontaneities seem as touchingly quaint as the shock they elicited at the time. Kerouac's vision was compounded of Buddhism, booze (of all bourgeois things) and a chaotic lowlife that he worked into exuberant underground literature. When he wrote of casual sex or marijuana, they were still exotic and forbidden fruits...
...reference to your review of Andrew Turnbull's book Thomas Wolfe [Feb. 9]: As Tom Wolfe's brother, I feel I knew him better than anyone living. You refer to Tom's attempt to "pin down the Great American Novel" as "never getting beyond his barbaric yawp." I feel sure that hundreds of thousands and more-who have read Tom's "Promise of America" and "Credo," both in You Can't Go Home Again-would disagree. This same multitude of readers of Tom's books would also take issue with...
...Pieces. In this attempt Wolfe never got beyond his barbaric yawp of an overture. He left only four novels, two of them posthumous, all of them painfully hacked out of his vast scrawlings by his editors. Since he had no ideas, he dealt with none. Politics interested him not at all, and economics could be summed up by comparing cash in hand with what he owed his landlord. He was an undisciplined poet of feelings, of emotions, usually his own and always tortured. Wolfe did leave memorable set pieces (in Look Homeward, Angel the death of his brother, the portrait...
Along with its music and anecdotal flow, his verse had the Whitmanesque "barbaric yawp," as in "Chicago" ("Hog butcher of the world"). Sandburg could also lilt a form of American haiku...
...other side just couldn't cope with the Fugs' "Whitmanic orgy yawp." The Fugs contains a number of songs ("Frenzy," "Skin Flowers," "Group Grope," and "Doin' All Right") which are uninhibited, if awkward, paeans to sex love. Sample lyrics...