SOURCE: “No Marvelous Boys,” in Kenyon Review, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Spring, 1963 pp. 374–79.

In the excerpt below, Seidensticker reviews Corso's Long Live Man, arguing that it is fragmentary and lacking in quality.

I prefer, like Solomon, a live dog to a dead lion, and that may well exhaust my wisdom concerning Mr. Corso. He is approaching the christological age, the fatal age—l'an trentiesme de son age—but at least no square stanzas to celebrate the fact. The most he will do to recognize his condition is to give us even more bravado, to expand rather than retrench, to go to Greece and become Childe Corso among the Ruins or to Italy and speak to St. Francis in the strange and spendthrift “al tongue” he has made for himself:

I praise you your love, Your benedictions of animals and                     men, When the night-horn blew, And the world's property was...