SOURCE: “Gasoline,” in Exiled Angel: A Study of the Work of Gregory Corso, Hearing Eye, 1989, pp. 21–30.

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...