In 1951, twenty-one-year-old Gregory Corso joined the Beat circle and was adopted by its coleaders, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who saw in the young street-wise writer a potential for expressing the poetic insights of a generation wholly separate from those preceding it. At this time, Corso was employed as a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner, but four years before he had been sentenced to three years at Clinton Prison, in Dannemora, New York, where despite his minimal formal education, he developed a crude and fragmented mastery of Shelley, Marlowe, and Chatterton. Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry" (1840), with its emphasis on the ability of genuine poetic impulse to stimulate "unapprehended combinations of thought" that lead to the "moral improvement of man," prompted Corso to develop a theory of poetry roughly consistent with that of the developing principles of the Beat poets. For Corso, poetry became a vehicle for...