Although the Beat movement never was conveniently defined or organized and there were never manifestos or position papers, there were some ideas--some attitudes--that all of the Beat writers shared, even if their writing sprawled stylistically from the picaresque prose memoirs of Jack Kerouac to the torrential accusations of Allen Ginsberg and to the careful contemplations on the nature of perception of Gary Snyder. There was a shared consciousness that somehow the American system had failed, and with this was the opposite emotion, a reverence for nature and the natural. The Beats had confidence in the power of the spoken, the vernacular language, rather than in the literary language. There was a mystic belief in the oneness of the universe that would support and sustain them all, and there was also the belief that the senses, if pushed to their extremes, would deliver up some of the secrets of...