SOURCE: Review of The Vestal Lady on Brattle, in Poetry, Vol. 89, No. 1, October, 1956, pp. 48–52.

In the excerpt below, Denney discusses the concepts of audience and interpretation in modern poetry, using Corso's The Vestal Lady on Brattle as an example.

… The booklet of this urban-sounding author [Corso] comes from Cambridge and has the title of The Vestal Lady on Brattle. All of the poems have the air of having been preceded immediately by the hipster vocative, “Man!” Their one-man-Calypso of jive goes “far out” to work that interjectional, parenthetical, real-crazy style associated with bop discourse. Bopster Corso simply digs one thing and another as he goes along, mostly himself, no time overtime on the craft. He fails a king-size assignment blowing a funeral “Saints” for Jazzman Bird Parker, but that's because the job is too big for his reed. His macaronic take-off on the innocent frontier of American whiskey-advertisements...