[In the following excerpt, Stephenson describes Corso's seminal work Gasoline as a conflict between imagination and reality.]

Gasoline, published in 1958, is the book that established Gregory Corso's literary reputation both in the United States and internationally. It is a seminal work of what has been called “the new American poetry”, interjecting a spirit of wild, improvisatory freedom of creation and unbridled vision into the literature of the postwar period. We recognize in the poems of this collection the same vitality and inventiveness, the same zany humour and euphoria of metaphor that animated the poet's first volume, together with a greater fluency and deftness, a surer sense of shape and focus. A small book, 32 poems on 37 pages, Gasoline lives up to its title: it is a volatile and combustive collection.

The opening poem of the volume, “Ode to Coit Tower”, announces the nature and the terms of the conflict that informs and encompasses the other poems in the book, namely the conflict between imagination and the material world, between vision and the real. In Corso's ode, humankind's aspiration toward beauty and vision is emblemized by Coit Tower, while all that confines, represses, restrains and oppresses that aspiration is emblemized by the island prison of Alcatraz.

In a sequence of images the tower is associated with “illuminations” and “visions”, with children, with poetry and with sexuality, that is to say with the creative, the visionary, the innocent and ecstatic. The prison, by contrast, is seen to be the visible sign of the “petrific bondage” in which the sense and the spirit are held, and is further seen as a symbol of the destructive agencies of the world that seek to vanquish and subdue all dream and song, all manifestations of the visionary.

From the summit of the tower, the poet experiences a vision of Mercy herself crucified against the wind above the prison, “weeping … for humanity's vast door to open that all men be free that both hinge and lock die”.

The poet mourns not only the imprisoned state of humanity in the world but his own loss of vision and his consequent affliction by “reality's worm”. He grieves for the loss of his imaginative faculties, for “that which was no longer sovereign in me”, and longs to regain the “dreams that once jumped joyous bright from my heart”, together with “that madness again that infinitive solitude where illusion spoke Truth's divine dialect”.

In place of the mythic splendours, the grandeurs, the joy and the intense response to natural beauty that characterized the poet's youthful perception and imagination, he now experiences a vision of Death and can hear only “a dark anthem” of foreboding and fear.

There are, however, two sources of solace for the poet. The first of these consists of the “heroes” and “saints” of vision who continue to uphold and to affirm dream, delight, energy and imagination in the face of the tyranny of materialism. The second solace is the knowledge that the physical world is written in “Swindleresque ink”, that is disappearing ink. Material reality, the phenomenal world, are, then, ephemeral; they are illusions which will ultimately fade and vanish to reveal the true and eternal reality that they now obscure.

Corso's ode reverses the meaning of the imaginary, for the imagination is seen to be a mode of perceiving the Eternal, while what we consider to be reality, the world of the senses, is seen to be imaginary, a mere semblance with no substantial existence. The poem also proposes the essential premise of the poet's art: the universal struggle of the forces of spirit and matter, truth and falsehood, in which conflict poetry is a weapon in the arsenal of vision. The battle is waged at all levels, in the macrocosm of the world, and in the microcosm of each psyche, including, of course, that of the poet himself. This is Corso's grand theme, the essential context and argument of virtually all of his poems.

Both in structure and in theme, “Ode to Coit Tower” has affinities with certain poems of the English Romantics, including William Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode”, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”, (the latter of which Corso's poem alludes to in its concluding section). Certain parallels to the thought of William Blake may also be discerned in the poem. These likenesses and correspondences do not, in my estimation, diminish the achievement of Corso's ode, but rather serve to enrich and illuminate his poem, establishing also a kinship and a continuity of concern with the poet-seers of the past.

Stylistically, the ode is, perhaps, Corso's most uncharacteristic poem, blending echoes of Whitman and Ginsberg, and of Wordsworth and Shelley, with the poet's own wild imagery, his quirky syntax and diction. The long lines in which the poem is cast seem too dense, too heavy, working against Corso's quick, brilliant bursts of words, and overweighing the cursive character of his phrasing. Each stylistic component of the poem remains a disparate element, never really attaining coherence, equilibrium, integrity or significant interrelation with the other component elements. Yet, despite these technical flaws, the poem remains a forceful and cogent statement of the poet's vision, and serves effectively as an overture to the collection.

The motif of confinement, introduced in “Ode to Coit Tower”, recurs in separate poems throughout the volume, (e.g. “The Last Warmth of Arnold”) and provides the central image for “Puma in Chapultepec Zoo”. The poem begins with a description of the caged puma, emphasizing its grace and beauty, and contrasting the narrow closeness of the animal's present confinement with the expansiveness of its former freedom in the mountains. The predicament of the puma brings to the poet's mind the recollection of a distant friend:

I think of Ulanova
locked in some small furnished room
in New York, on East 17th Street
in the Puerto Rican section.

Despite the specificity of the poet's association, I think that by extension both the situation of the caged puma and of Ulanova, “locked in some small furnished room”, may be read as metaphors of the human predicament: the spirit caged in the material world, vision locked in the senses, beauty and grace held prisoner in a fallen world.

Similarly, the poem “Amnesia in Memphis” presents an unnamed speaker who may be seen to represent all humankind. The narrator of the poem lives in a twilight state between life and death, perhaps a posthumous existence in his own dead body. He cannot recall his identity but only vague images of his former life as he lies “half-embalmed” and helpless. His loss of life and identity seems to have coincided with a general failure of magical, divine and prophetic powers at this period, apparently the end of ancient Egyptian civilization. The final prophecy foretells calamity, collapse and dissolution:

The papyrus readers have seen the Falcon's head
Fall unto the Jackal's plate.

This prophecy would seem to relate to our own time, the post-mythic era, when that which was noble, celestial and airborne (the Falcon) has been overthrown and devoured by that which is ignoble, earthbound and base, (the Jackal). And, in a manner much like the state of the narrator of the poem, we are all of us only half-alive and unaware of who we are, oblivious to our divine potential. The poem reinforces the volume's theme of mankind's state of “petrific bondage”, and prefigures Corso's later interest in Egyptian mythology.

Further images of the confinement of the human spirit in the material universe are presented in “To a Downfallen Rose” and in “Sun”. In the first poem, the downfallen rose is an emblem of the plight of the spirit, which once existed in an Edenic state and is now caught in “the vast fixedness” of matter, and which is subject to “the hateful law” of the phenomenal world, to time, decay and physical death. Trapped and helpless, the rose screams in anguish, distress and despair. In the second of the two poems, the sun is celebrated for its life-giving qualities, for its divine character as “helion, apollo, rha, sol”, and it is seen to be not a material entity, not a giant ball of fiery gases, but, instead, an aperture. In the poet's mythopoeic vision the sun represents an opening to the realm of true life and light, a passage to the dominion of beauty and vision:

O constant hole where all beyond is true Byzantium.

A celestial realm of light and vision is portrayed in the poem “In the Fleeting Hand of Time”, which contrasts the state of non-material or astral being with life in the world. Corso invokes an intense, dreamlike atmosphere charged with supernatural beauty and solemn splendour to represent the celestial world, in contrast to which the physical world is depicted as stark, bleak and drab.

The poem records the poet's experience of a state of pre-existence (including the memory of a former incarnation) and his birth again on earth. From the radiant beauty and grandeur of the astral plane he descends to the raw, drear material world in which he feels acutely alien. Gradually, in the world's taint and stain he loses every remnant of grace and glory, and longs for death. Through death, he re-ascends and regains a “room of paradisical light”, finding renewal and truer life.

“In the Fleeting Hand of Time” bears, of course, a glancing resemblance to Wordsworth's famous “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” in its poetic treatment of the notion of pre-existence. The resemblance goes no further, though, than that of a shared idea, and Corso's poem is in no way imitative or derivative. The poem represents an important expression of Corso's personal cosmography and mythology, the essential metaphysic of his work, and it is characteristically (and appropriately) personal, visual, image-rich, proposing not a systematic theology but an inspired poetic vision.

In the poems of Gasoline we encounter again the motif of predatory devouring and destruction of innocence and beauty, already familiar from Corso's first collection. This motif is clearly and powerfully expressed in “Don't Shoot the Warthog”, where a child, personifying Beauty, is abused and devoured in a cannibal frenzy. It is appropriate that the child is first seen “swinging an ocean on a stick”, for this type of exercise of the impossible, the fabulous, is entirely in keeping with the poet's essential surrealist aesthetic. Similarly, it is fitting that when the other children in the poem hear the name of Beauty they respond by leaping with joy and running to see, while it is the adults who are the persecutors of and the predators upon Beauty.

Parallel sorts of unjust, undeserved injury and harm are inflicted upon innocents in “The Last Warmth of Arnold” and in “The Mad Yak”. In the former poem, the eponymous hero, Arnold, is a sensitive, shy, gentle boy whose interests include religion, literature, music and his pet pigeon. He is in love with a classmate, Eleanor, but his love is unreturned. He is a fearful child who hides under the porch and seeks out warm places in the cold world. Arnold is an alien, “from somewhere else / where it was warm”; an idealistic child in a sordid, hopeless environment of bookies and chicken pluckers, bums and sad old ladies who sit all day in the park. Arnold is rejected by the world (as is the cause to which he gives his allegiance, the Wilkie campaign). He is unfairly assaulted, after which he starves and dies, another innocent martyr in a cruel, ugly, uncaring world.

Another pitiful victim of human cruelty is the yak whose interior monologue comprises the poem, “The Mad Yak”. Here, Corso effects a reversal of the conventional connotations of the terms “human” and “animal”, contrasting the patient, compassionate yak to the callous and greedy human beings who exploit and slaughter the yaks. The humans are quite insensitive to both the beauty and the suffering of the animals, viewing them only in terms of products, such as scarves, caps, buttons and shoelaces. The yak, on the other hand, feels sorrow and compassion for its fellow creatures, and a deep sense of relatedness to them. It mourns the loss of its brothers and sisters, and feels pity for its uncle: “Poor uncle, … / How sad he is, how tired!” In short, the yak exhibits all the best qualities that we normally associate with human beings, while the humans of the poem (including the monk!) are base and “animalistic”.

“The Mad Yak” bears several themes. It is an expression of the poet's compassion for all sentient beings, and of his sense of man's ideal relation to nature and of the essential unity of all life. At the same time, the poem may be read as a criticism of man's disposition to sacrifice natural beauty and freedom (including his own) to mundane, practical ends. The poem also reinforces the theme of the world's brutal persecution of the innocent, its destruction of beauty.

The ultimate embodiment of the persecuted, innocent victims of mankind's vicious malice is the figure of Christ in the poem, “Ecce Homo”. Contemplating a painting of the crucified Christ by Theodoricus, the poet expresses his sense of grief and horror at the tortures inflicted upon this most gentle of all men, the very incarnation of divinity. Such is the fierce, fell quality of the cruelty that motivated the act that the poet concludes that the worst wounds “went thru the man to God”. As the title of the poem suggests, the figure of Christ is capable of being understood in two senses: it can be seen to represent the most ignoble and vile of all of man's acts, the torture and murder of the Prince of Peace; and, it can be seen as the symbolic embodiment of all of mankind's highest and noblest aspirations. Significantly, it is the artist, Theodoricus, and the poet who ally themselves with the sufferer, and thus with all victims, and who accuse and reprimand the perpetrators, and thus by extension all tyrants and bullies together with their supporters.

The conspiracy against joy and beauty by the forces of repressive cruelty and death is further instanced and elaborated in the poems, “Vision of Rotterdam” and “Paris”. In both poems the cities are metaphors for civilization in the best sense of the word, that is the cultivation of the mind and spirit. The armies that have attacked and occupied the cities during the past represent all that is barbarous, brutal and retrograde in man. Both poems celebrate the indominatable, irrepressible character of joy and beauty, in that the two cities have survived bombing and occupation, they have prevailed over their conquerors.

In “Vision of Rotterdam”, the poet envisions a bombardment of mercy and miracles, of gentleness and kindness that will rout the invisible occupying armies of anti-life, deliver the populace and regenerate the city. “Paris” asserts that the forces of uncreation and unlife have their collaborators among us, their fifth column of “informers and concierges” who aid and abet them and who attempt to enforce their dictates. But, at the same time, there are those who heroically oppose the occupying forces: “Spirits of angels crouching in doorways / … beautiful Baudelaire, Artaud, Rimbaud, Appolinaire”, and others.

Neither the occupation of the world by the combined forces of lifelessness, lovelessness, joylessness, banality, blandness and stasis, nor the domination of true life by matter, are stable, permanent conditions, Corso asserts. The victors are constantly at risk, ever vulnerable to harassment, ambush and sabotage by the resistance movement, the angelic underground of poets, artists, lovers, saints, clowns and children.

The poems “Botticelli's Spring”, “Uccello”, and “This Was My Meal”, treat the theme of the transforming power of the imagination. In the first of these it is the magical property of art to affect the external world that is manifested when Botticelli causes spring to appear in the physical world by the act of painting it on canvas. In the second poem, the poet praises the power of art to transfigure the disorder and even the violence and cruelty of life and to impose upon them, or discover in them, harmony, unity and beauty. The third poem celebrates the imagination in its purest and most potent form, as it is exercised by children. An ordinary, and indeed rather unappetizing meal of peas, cow's brain and milk, with a prune dessert, occasions in the fantasy of a child an extraordinary adventure in which wonders and marvels abound. In each of the poems the imagination triumphs over the material world, evidence that it is a powerful instrument of human redemption.

As in Corso's first collection, images of violence and death, especially the death of children, are frequent in the poems of Gasoline. In addition to the persecuted victims already discussed, there are the “young child—doomed by his sombrero” who is glimpsed in “Mexican Impressions”, and the dead month-old infant in “Italian Extravaganza”. There are the deaths of the streetsinger, the gardener and child in “Three”, and the murder of Kindness in “But I Do Not Need Kindness”. Further images of violence occur in “D. Scarlatti”, “Birthplace Revisited”, and “The Last Gangster”.

Closely related to the violence-and-death motif in Corso's poetry are the recurring images of alienation and loss. The windmill “alone, aline, helpless” among cacti in a windless land (in “Mexican Impressions”) is one such figure, the doll abandoned in the attic in “Doll Poem” is such another, together with the narrators of “On the Walls of a Dull Furnished Room” and “I Miss My Dear Cats”. These two clusters of images combine to create a sense of the barreness and terror of human existence.

The effect of such imagery is offset, however, by the poet's impish humour and by the energy and excitement and the magical lyricism of his poems. Gasoline presents a myth or metaphysic of a fallen world, a debased state of existence from which man can be delivered by means of the imagination and the faculty of vision. Thus, despite their preoccupation with suffering, persecution, alienation and death, these poems affirm man's potential victory over the external world.

Among the strategies enacted by Corso's poems to serve this end is their cultivation of a mythic, animistic sensibility, and their corresponding emancipation of language through a dissolution of syntactical restrictions and denotative lexical meanings.

In the poems of Gasoline Corso ascribes consciousness to windmills, flowers, dolls, trees, valleys, mountains and moonlight. He personifies Time, Mercy, Kindness, Beauty, Truth and Death. He alludes to Egyptian, Greek and Aztec mythologies, and invents his own myths. By means of such actions and processes, such feats of the imagination, the poet endeavours to lift the malediction of habit and limitation, to restore life to the inanimate and the abstract. He gives names and forms to the mysterious powers latent in the life of the world, returning them to their sacred status. He joins together again that which has been separated, aiding in the re-establishment of primordial unity.

In the poem, “No Word”, Corso declares his independence from the conventional uses and banal ends of language:

It is better man a word elongate
and eat up what another spake
It is better man give up his diction
become mouthless
it is better
than another man, myself
heed his restriction

Corso “elongates” and “eats up” words by means of copulative coinages such as “redsmash”, “joyprints”, “hungersulk”, “eyehand”, “rosefamed”, “sunbone”, and “wheatweather”; and by metamorphic fusions such as “eucharistic feet”, “ventriloquial telegram”, “brides of wheat”, “windless monkage”, “spider thirst” and “dome heirloomed”. He forms adjectives such as “swindleresque”, “visionic”, “vegetic” and “deathical”; and alters temporal, logical and syntactic relations among the components of his sentences to create ellipsis, associative connections, condensation, shifts of context, displacements, juxtapositions, or for rhythmic effect: “Sun misery sun ire sun sick sun dead sun rot sun relic!”

For Corso language is an instrument of exploration and revelation. Words for him possess a magical, incantatory power. He is intoxicated with words, fascinated by their sounds and meanings, their strange conjunctions and disjunctions. Like that of Rimbaud, Corso's poetic enterprise is the alchemy of the word, the verbal transmutation of the world. His expressive, explosive, explorative utilization of language is at once destructive and constructive, subverting traditional modes of thought and conventional notions of reality, as it exalts desire, freedom and vision.

Gasoline is an urgent, audacious yet graceful collection that confirms an uncommon and an important poetic talent.