SOURCE: “‘To Dream, Perchance to Be’: Gregory Corso and Imagination,” in University of Dayton Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, Summer 1989, pp. 69–78.

In the following essay, Skau explores the relationship between social conditions and Corso's response as a writer, particularly the conflict between assimilation and individuality.

“To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.” 

(France 113)

The increasingly personal and confessional quality in contemporary poetry is, in part, a reaction to the diminishing role of the individual within society. Artists attempt to reassert the primacy of individual worth, for the artist's role has also been adversely affected. Seymour Krim describes the modern age as “a period when the terrifying bigness of society makes the average person resort to more immediate and practical oracles (psychiatrists, sociologists, chemists) than to the kind of imaginative truth that the artist can give” (126). For Gregory Corso, the poetic attack on the forces which obscure or...