He threw his hands in the air and let out a barbaric
yawp. It caught on the westbound wind and was carried across all of Austin.
"Brazilian 'Barbaric Yawps.'" Rocznik Komparatystyczny /Comparative Yearbook 4 (2013), 305-312.
"Whitman's 'Barbaric Yawp' Sounded in Serbian." Rocznik Komparatystyczny / Comparative Yearbook 4 (2013), 313-319.
"To Yawp, Or Not To Yawp: French Translators and Whitman's Distinctive Idiom." Rocznik Komparatystyczny / Comparative Yearbook 4 (2013), 287-297.
English: "English is an outrageous tangle of those [Greco-Latin] derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous
yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies."
Our barbaric
yawps over the rooftops of the world are probably, and perhaps best, long gone.
But just as the
yawps of feelings in Going Places did not predict the more candid articulations of I Would Have Saved Them if I Could, and just as the comedy of The Men's Club did not hint at the pathos of its revision, nor can the madness and sorrow of Sylvia prepare a reader for the character one meets in "The Nachman Stories."
Although Smith refers in passing to "the barbaric
yawps of establishment supermen," this apparent paradox (and Whitman--author of the "barbaric
yawp"--was both unembarrassed by capitalism and, in envisioning himself as a "kosmos," totalizing) is deeply historical and dynamic.
But it'll be met by delighted
yawps from the boutique art salons of Woolloomooloo to the bush galleries of Tennant Creek.
72), a command to sound their barbaric
yawps of "No more!" over the riverbanks of the world, a command to engage in the most "unmanly" of activities--childish play.
and from the self-invented musical
yawps of folks like Harry Partch.
Despite their unflagging energy, long lists of Whitmanesque "
yawps," all-embracing compassion, and stinging eroticism, I'm impressed anew at how melancholy they mostly seem.
In doing so, Whitman was attempting a literary feat that differed in important ways from Leaves of Grass, for while Leaves had relied upon the vociferous and capacious "yawps" of "Walt Whitman, a kosmos" to attract a reading public, Drum-Taps would rely upon the cold and mute corpses of the "Million Dead, Too, Summ'd Up" to invoke a powerfully recuperative investment.
The choice to have these dead and dying soldiers remain mute and unable to tell their story is a crucial part of Whitman's aesthetic (and ethic) in Drum-Taps--and represents an important divergence from his previous mode of representation in Song of Myself where its subject "Walt Whitman" is given free reign to sound his "barbaric yawp." But just as Song of Myself was an attempt to cast "Walt Whitman" as a "presence forever accessible to readers of the future ...
Hence the barbaric
yawps of joyful noise-makers like Harry Partch.
