BEAT GENERATION
"Beat": This term comes from Kerouac's On the Road. (Beatnik was coined by Herb Caen after the Russian Sputnik satellite was launched and is used to link Beats with communist thought.) The term refers to several things: a. the condition of being beat down to the bottom of society where you have nothing to lose; b. beatific (angelic) visions that reveal the inner sanctity of the self; c. the be-bop jazz beat with which the Beats identified themselves.
The Beats, along with New York School artists & poets (Jackson Pollack, Willem deKonning, Frank O'Hara & many others) held a romantic belief in the first person subjective experience to accurately render hidden aspects of reality. The principal means to achieve such expression was through automatism, the unconscious creation of forms. The content of a work was an intrinsic function of the art of creating it. In other words, a work's significance lay in the process of creating and consuming it and not just in the limited theme or scene it represented. The aesthetic isn't really abstract; instead, it attempts to represent a more complicated inner reality than is possible in realistic writing or art.