the standard-bearers of Corso’s time, such as Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom. In fact, in an act of Dionysian rebellion, Corso, in a poem entitled “I Am Twenty-five,” bluntly proclaims “I HATE OLD POETMEN!”—especially those “who speak their youth in whispers.” The poet-clown, in true Dionysian fashion, would like to gain the confidence of the “Old Poetman,” insinuating himself into the sanctity of his home, and then “rip out their apology tongues/ and steal their poems.”

The Happy Birthday of Death

The Happy Birthday of Death presents the best example of Corso as Dionysian clown. In the lengthy ten-part poem entitled simply “Clown,” Corso presents this persona more explicitly than he does in any other place when he asserts, “I myself am my own happy fool.” The fool or the clown is the personification of the “pure poetry” of Arthur Rimbaud or Walt Whitman, rejecting the academic Apollonian style of the formalists. “I am an always clown,” writes Corso, “and need not make grammatic Death’s diameter.”

Several of the poems of The Happy Birthday of Death, notably the award-winning “Marriage,” offer critiques of respected institutions of bourgeois society. This poem, perhaps Corso’s most popular, is structured around the central questions: “Should I get married? Should I be good?” In a surrealistic feast of language-play, Corso contrasts the social ritual of marriage (“absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes,” Niagara Falls honeymoons, cornball relatives) with the irrational and spontaneous phrases he inserts throughout the poem, such as “Flash Gordon soap,” “Pie Glue,” “Radio Belly! Cat Shovel!” and “Christmas Teeth.” In opposition to the conformist regimentation of suburban life, the speaker contrives unconventional schemes, such as sneaking onto a neighbor’s property late at night and “hanging pictures of Rimbaud on the lawnmower” or covering “his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books.”

Long Live Man

In his later work Long Live Man, Corso continued his Dionysian assault on established literary conventions. The poem “After Reading ’In the Clearing,’” for example, finds the speaker admitting that he likes the “Old Poetman” Robert Frost better now that he knows he is “no Saturday Evening Post philosopher.” Nevertheless, Frost is “old, old” like Rome, and, says the poet, “You undoubtedly think unwell of us/ but we are your natural children.” What Corso intends is not to suggest that youth should respect age, but rather, as William Wordsworth wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” that “the child is father to the man.” As Corso points out in his urban poem “A City Child’s Day,” the “Grownups do not go where children go/ At break of day their worlds split apart.”

Two short poems in the earlier Long Live Man, viewed together, seem to foreshadow the approach Corso later used to criticize the institution of marriage and, still later, in Elegiac Feelings American and Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit, Corso maintains his Dionysian critique of Apollonian standards. The first poem is entitled “Suburban Mad Song”; the second, “The Love of Two Seasons.” The first asks how the wife will look at the husband after “the horns are still,” when the celebration is ended “and marriage drops its quiet shoe.” In other words, when the Dionysian passions of the first experiences become the frozen form, the institution of marriage, the once-happy couple “freeze right in their chairs/ troubled by the table.” The only solution for such stasis, Corso seems to be saying in the other short poem, “The Love of Two Seasons,” is “the aerial laughter [of] mischief.”

Elegiac Feelings American

In “The American Way,” a long poem from Elegiac Feelings American, Corso worries that the prophetic force of Christ is becoming frozen by American civil religion. “They are frankensteining Christ,” the poet says despairingly; “they are putting the fear of Christ in America” and “bringing their Christ to the stadiums.” Christ, for Corso, is the pure force of reality, while religious institutions are merely perversions even as love between two people is a pure and sacred force, while marriage is profane. “If America falls,” writes Corso, “it will be the blame of its educators preachers communicators alike.”

Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit

Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit suggests not only that the poet has not withered with age but also that he has mastered an ironic voice while maintaining his comic, childlike energy. In a simple poem, “When a Boy,” he remarks, first of all, how he “monitored the stairs/ alter’d the mass” in church, as opposed to the pleasure of summer camp, when he “kissed the moon in a barrel of rain.” Similarly, in the poem “Youthful Religious Experience,” he tells how he found a dead cat when he was six years old and compassionately prayed for it, placing a cross on the animal. When he told this to the Sunday school teacher, she pulled his ears and told him to remove the cross. The old, Corso maintains, can never comprehend the eternally young.

In another poem from this collection, “What the Child Sees,” Corso depicts the child as “innocently contemptuous of the sight” of old age’s foolishness. “There’s rust on the old truths,” Corso contends in “For Homer,” and “New lies don’t smell as nice as new shoes.” What the poet, like the child, perceives as pleasurable is the immediate, sensual experience, such as the smell of new shoes, not the abstractions of dried-up old lies. The sadness at the root of this pleasure, however, is a sadness that appears in much of Corso’s poetry, evoked by the perennial reality of death.

Mindfield

The 1989 collection Mindfield is a compilation of Corso’s favorite poems throughout his career, along with new poems. Here, one can trace the maturation of the poet across three decades. Particularly revealing are the seven poems written after the appearance of Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit in 1981 but previously unpublished. These poems illustrate the growth of Corso as a poet who, at the half century point in his life, had broadened the range and scope of his poetry while maintaining some of the themes that have dominated his work from the early 1950’s.

In the poem “Window,” written in 1982, Corso confronts the painful reality of his own mortality. The horror of death, however, becomes merely an evil invention of the older generation that, asserts the man-child Corso, is notoriously “unreliable.” Writes Corso:

  . . . your parents your priest your guru are people  and it is they who tell you that you must die  to believe them is to die . . .

As a romantic, Corso draws his lessons from nature. Proclaiming his “contempt for death” and asserting that “the spirit knows better than the body,” Corso offers the reader lines of poetry as moving as many of Wordsworth’s in his assertion of immortality:

 As the fish is animalized water so are we humanized spirit fish come and go humans also the death of the fish is not the death of the water likewise the death of yr body is not the death of life So when I say I shall never know my death, I mean it . . .

To Corso, death is merely another limit or restraint that he challenges throughout his poetry. When he writes, at one point, “Death I unsalute you,” Corso illustrates his resistance to all limits that restrict what he sees as the limitless strength of the human spirit.

In the longest of the previously unpublished poems,“Field Report,” Corso confronts the inevitable approach of old age with words that are gentle and not fearful. That poem, like most of his other later works, seems to give support to the words of Corso’s contemporary and friend, Allen Ginsberg, who writes in his introduction to Mindfield (“On Corso’s Virtues”) words that, while written about a single poem (“The Whole Mess . . . Almost” from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit), could be said about most of Corso’s later poetry: The poem is “a masterpiece of Experience, the grand poetic abstractions Truth, Love, God, Faith Hope Charity, Beauty, money, Death, & Humor are animated in a single poem with brilliant & intimate familiarity.”

In others of his previously unpublished poems from the 1980’s, particularly “Hi” and “Fire Report—No Alarm,” Corso grapples with such large metaphysical issues as God, mortality, immortality, and the identity of Jesus. Without God, Corso concludes ironically, the Reverend Jerry Falwell (leader of the conservative Moral Majority and the Christian Right) might well be putting onions on hamburgers. Such pithy, concrete insights are what give humor and vividness to Corso’s later poetry.