SOURCE: “The Poetry of Gregory Corso,” in London Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, April 1961, pp. 74–7.

In the following essay, Fuller argues that Corso's balanced and autobiographical treatment of reality sets his writing above other Beat writers.

How else to feel other than I am, a young man who often thinks Flash Gordon soap— 

These lines from a long poem, ‘Marriage’, give us perhaps the essential Corso, not so much ‘the Dead End kid who fell in love with beauty’ as a natural idealist coming to terms with a real, if often absurd, world of human objects and behaviour. Thus he uses ‘think’ plainly and rather naïvely as both ‘notice’, ‘remember’ and as ‘imagine’: the images of his poetry acquire that intensity which is perhaps an inheritance from surrealism, of an equal approval of both created and observed phenomena. If ‘Flash Gordon soap’ is a kind of objet trouvé (there...