Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist by Kirby Olson


Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist
Title : Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0809324474
ISBN-10 : 9780809324477
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 200
Publication : First published August 30, 2002

Gregory Corso is the most intensely spiritual of the Beat generation poets and still by far the least explored. The virtue of Kirby Olson’s Gregory Doubting Thomist is that it is the first book to place all of Corso’s work in a philosophical perspective, concentrating on Corso as a poet torn between a static Catholic Thomist viewpoint and that of a progressive surrealist. While Corso is a subject of great controversy—his work often being seen as nihilistic and wildly comic—Olson argues that Corso’s poetry, in fact, maintains an insistent theme of doubt and faith with regard to his early Catholicism. Although many critics have attempted to read his poetry, and some have done so brilliantly, Olson—in his approach and focus—is the first to attempt to give a holistic understanding of the oeuvre as essentially one not of entertainment or hilarity but of a deep spiritual and philosophical quest by an important and profound mind. In nine chapters, Olson addresses Corso from a broad philosophical perspective and shows how Corso takes on particular philosophical issues and contributes to new understandings. Corso’s concerns, like his influence, extend beyond the Beat generation as he speaks about concerns that have troubled thinkers from the beginning of the Western tradition, and his answers offer provocative new openings for thought. Corso may very well be the most important Catholic poet in the American literary canon, a visionary like Burroughs and Ginsberg, whose work illuminated a generation. Written in a lively and engaging style, Gregory Doubting Thomist seeks to keep Corso’s memory alive and at last delve fully into Corso’s poetry.

Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist Reviews

  • AC

    A strange, certainly informed and intelligent, academic treatment of Corso's poetry that tries to show that Corso was a Catholic poet. I'm in no position to judge. There are lots of references to Bakhtin, to Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, to gnosticism (-- Corso, apparently, had all sorts of mystic, half-baked, drug-induced, philosophical ideas).

  • Mat

    In the lingering absence of a biography on one of the greatest, most underrated but controversial beat poets, Kirby Olson's academic study of Gregory Corso is probably the best book available on him in print that you will find on the planet.

    While Gregory Stephenson's excellent book Exiled Angel offers very astute and perceptive analysis of each of Corso's major poetic works, as well as some of his plays and prose, Olson's book Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist looks at what makes Corso tick and also how his upbringing and disturbed childhood helped shape his highly individual and singular mind.

    First of all the title, Doubting Thomist - it refers to St. Thomas Aquinas - probably the most brilliant Christian theological scholar and philosopher of all time. Olson traces Corso's troubled upbringing, after being abandoned by both of his parents (his mother disappearing when Corso was only 6 months old, and his father only taking him back to try and escape the draft and when his father eventually gets drafted, Corso winds up homeless in the streets, sometimes sleeping on the rooftops), and after being sent around to about 8 different foster families, some of which beat him for things like wetting the bed, Corso found solace early on in the Catholic Church but later on in the beauty of poetry. When he goes to prison, Corso happens to occupy the cell recently vacated by Lucky Luciano and some of the (ex) mafia dons and Italian gangsters doing time along with him realise he is Italian but not 'connected' (i.e. on his own) and perhaps pitying the young Italian man, hand him the 'books of enlightenment' that would prove so crucial in his future career as a poet, and young Gregory begins his crash self-learning course with a vengeance.

    Despite never finishing high school, Corso would go on to read through the whole Oxford Dictionary, a whole encyclopaedia set of books called The Story of Civilisation, not to mention a wide swath of poets from Shelley to Rimbaud, not to mention many of the Greek poets and writers such as Homer.

    Olson points out in this book how Corso's mental state is in a constant state of doubt, a mind constantly swinging backwards, like a pendulum, between faith and unbelief. His beliefs and convictions are never static; they are always dynamic. As Olson says, "America’s greatest poet, Gregory Corso, spent his life alternately doubting and responding fervently to that life and to the faith Christ created. Corso’s ambivalence in life was no doubt caused by his abandonment as a child, but his subsequent strict Catholic upbringing gave him a strong sense of belonging. His poetry records his doubt but also, and most importantly, the power of his belief.” (Olson, Kirby. Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist: p. 170). This ambiguity which lies at the heart of most of his great poems also gives it its unique charm and mystery. His early Catholic beliefs, largely Thomist (based on St. Thomas Aquinas, set out in his Summa Theologicae) are then watered down by Darwinism and then challenged further with postmodern iconoclastic humour and various other philosophies. In other words, a portrait of a very complex, disturbed but intelligent poet and man begins to emerge.

    Like Corso's actual poems, these 'knots' or 'threads' need to be slowly unwoven or peeled back to reveal more about what makes Corso tick and what he is striving to do with his poetry. Olson really hits it on the head, I believe, when he says, "Corso’s paradoxical poetry helped to lift himself and his generation out of cynicism and despair toward a poetic engagement with the realms of uplifting humor and religious faith. Corso gave his generation a sense of continuity with the past and a hope in the future.” (Olson, Kirby. Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist: p. 181)

    In a world of corona viruses and false news, fear and confusion, we could do with some of that hope right about now.