[Corso] has neither the philosophical depth or breadth of Ginsberg, which is considerable, no matter what an individual's reaction to him might be. But in many ways, Corso's poetry is more pleasing than Ginsberg's, perhaps because it is more easily recognized as being within more major traditions, especially in the sense of the poetic line; we have come to expect lines that are shorter than a page is wide. Another more comfortable aspect of Corso's poetry is that he has more "negative capability" than does Ginsberg. Like Ginsberg, and most Romantics, his constant concern is with the Self, but he nearly always manages to distill turbulent emotions so that they "merely" inform the intellectual experience of the poem, instead of comprising the poem as do Ginsberg's in "Howl," for example.

But Corso is not an intellectual poet. Anything but. He is, like Ginsberg, a poet of the senses...