SOURCE: “Traveling Through the Dark: The Wilderness Surrealism of the Far West” The Midwest Quarterly, Winter, 1998 Vol. 39, No. 2, p.187–202.

In the following excerpt, Young examines the work of Corso as a poet of the American West.

In the last three decades, as an outgrowth of the I Sixties and in response to the influx of people and translations from all comers of the world, a particular kind of symbolist literature became prominent, the surreal. Some form of surrealist literature has found a home in an regions of the country. Yet an American surrealism, or, more accurately, “near surrealism,” has primarily been developed in the West, where the stark juxtaposition of nature and machine as well as the juxtapositions of a vide range of subcultures creates an art of dreamlike displacement.

The spectacular and desolate curve of sky and land, of mountain and plain, and of high plains and...