One of the more famous residents of Eliot House was also perhaps its least likely. After all, Gregory Corso wasn’t a Harvard professor, a tutor, or even a matriculating student. But for one momentous academic year, he slept in a tent in the sitting room of an undergraduate suite, beginning to write the poetry that would later make him a legend.
Today, we know Corso as the youngest of the Beat poets, whose work was destined for the curriculum at Harvard and beyond. His wry poetic voice explored classical references and Romantic themes through a distinctly modern and countercultural lens. Or it could be said that his poetry tried to understand modern life by putting it in classical and mythological terms.
But when he arrived in Cambridge in 1954, Corso had not yet published a word. He was recently out of prison, worked near campus as a janitor, and secured his long-term Harvard residence with an improbable writing assignment.
How Corso came to Cambridge, let alone Eliot House, is as implausible and serendipitous as anything else in his life. His time there continues to be one of the defining—if largely untold—stories of both Eliot House and its legendary master, John H. Finley Jr.
It is a testament to the expansiveness of Harvard that it made space for someone who wasn’t admitted past the gates, but rather bypassed them. That the House master who largely defined Harvard in the public imagination of those years could recognize the unchanneled talent of someone entirely without conventional credentials. And that Harvard’s institutions conferred their imprimatur on this consummate outsider who was embraced by some of the innermost circles.
Indeed, who could have imagined that one of America’s most unconventional voices would find such a welcome at a centuries-old institution, or that such an unlikely visitor could have such a lasting influence?
When Corso first showed up in the halls of Eliot House, he was filled with energy and ambition, but nothing yet to show for it. The 24-year-old had been orphaned (erroneously, as it turned out, but that’s another story), chose to be homeless rather than endure abuse in foster care, and had served three years in Dannemora prison in upstate New York for theft. (Stories vary over what he stole. He would sometimes claim he had stolen banned books to start a bookstore. Other times, it was a suit for a date.)
Dannemora proved vital to his education. While incarcerated, he devoured the prison library. He read Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Edgar Allen Poe, as well as the full works of historians Will and Ariel Durant. “Don’t just serve time,” he would later advise friends and other writers. “Make time serve you.” Prison inspired that advice, but Corso applied it to any situation that could be enriching rather than just endured.
After his incarceration, Corso briefly lived in New York City with Allen Ginsberg, who was then a largely unknown writer. One evening at the Cedar Tavern—the Greenwich Village haunt of the Abstract Expressionists—he met a woman who would change his life.
Violet “Bunny” Lang was an editor of the Chicago Review and a founding member of the Poets’ Theatre, an experimental troupe. (Many of the other founders of that group were recent graduates of Eliot House, including future U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall ’51, Frank O’Hara ’50, and Edward Gorey ’50.)
A distant relative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the 31-year-old Bunny danced burlesque at Boston’s Howard Athenaeum and often held editorial or theater meetings in the bathroom of her apartment, while she was in a bubble bath with a glass of champagne. In her 1984 book The Poets’ Theatre: A Memoir of the Fifties, troupe member Nora Sayre ’54 wrote that Bunny was “a witty outlaw whose passions overflowed the confines of New England gentility.” She was “intent on killing conventions [and] appeared to think that whatever was un-Bostonian was automatically enlightened.”
Naturally, Bunny was charmed by Corso’s mix of erudition and cheekiness—so much like her own. She invited him to Boston thinking he would be an incendiary, unwelcome, and provocative addition to the city. “She took him to starchy gatherings and urged him to be insolent,” wrote Sayre.
However, Bunny misjudged her audience. Or at least the moment. Far from being scandalized, her circle in Boston, especially the Poets’ Theatre crowd, adored him. And so he chose to extend his stay in Cambridge. Bunny arranged a job for him as a janitor at the theater and asked her friends if anyone could host him.
She happened to know a handful of Harvard students through the Poets’ Theatre and broader literary circles, as well as through O’Hara, with whom she lived in Greenwich Village. Which is how Corso came to live with Paul Grand ’55, Bobby Sedgwick ’55, and Peter Sourian ’55 in Eliot House.
It was only supposed to be for a few days. A week or so. After all, there wasn’t a spare bedroom in the Eliot House suite, so Corso simply set up a makeshift tent in the sitting room. “Not like a camping tent,” says Corso’s longtime friend, the translator and editor George Scrivani. “More like a child’s make-believe tent, a blanket draped over a couch. Gregory didn’t have a regular childhood, but he retained a childlike sense of wonder and play his whole life.”
Eliot House turned out to be the perfect location for Corso’s ambitions. For one, the house had been closely associated with poets ever since T.S. Eliot, A.B. 1909, A.M. ’11, lived there during his year as a Norton Fellow from 1932 to 1933. The roster continued to be equally distinguished, with faculty such as Pulitzer Prize winner and Legion of Honor recipient Archibald MacLeish, LL.B. 1919, and residents such as Hall, O’Hara, and future MacArthur Fellow John Ashbery ’49.
John H. Finley Jr. himself was described as “the embodiment of Harvard” in his New York Times obituary. A decade earlier, he had helped create General Education in a Free Society, the book that reshaped education at the University and across the United States. Finley believed that a humanistic, liberal education should be the foundation for every career. He believed in transmitting works of shared cultural heritage to the next generation. And he firmly believed that education did not only occur in the classroom—that students should learn as much from each other as from the faculty.
For Finley, Eliot House was a place to put those ideas into practice. He presided at a time when House leaders had a say in the selection of their students, and each House thus developed a distinct personality. He was known for his skillful mix of residents, and he often joked that while he was against cheap social engineering, “deft social engineering was another matter entirely.”
It’s difficult to imagine that Finley was unaware of this stowaway in Eliot House. But the sheer bravado of his arrival made Corso a perfect complement to what was then regarded as the most privileged and exclusive of the Houses.
Corso, who then dressed conservatively and wore short-clipped hair, wasn’t an obvious interloper when he first arrived. In some ways, he slipped quietly into College life: by day, he wrote poems and plays or attended classes, including Finley’s Hum 2 and 3 lectures—one on the Greeks, the other on “The Epic and the Novel.” Mixed into the crowd, no one seemed to notice that he was not enrolled in any section.
But in other ways, Corso’s roommates understood that they had to keep his profile low. “Sometimes we brought him into the dining room of Eliot House, but usually we smuggled his food back to the room in bowls,” Sourian would later recall in Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s oral history of Edie Sedgwick, Edie: American Girl. “He was, well, a bit…difficult in the dining room. He would attack people—I don’t mean physically, of course—for being idiots.”
This is exactly what Bunny had hoped he would do. But Corso’s mix of brilliance and volatility almost led to the end of his fortunate living arrangement. Someone—likely stung by one of his outbursts—finally reported him as a trespasser. It was Corso’s good fortune that the professor who handled the situation was Archibald MacLeish, the Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory. Their confrontation quickly became a heated discussion of poetry. Several versions of the story are told, but all agree that Corso told MacLeish, “You’re not a real poet!”
MacLeish—who by that point had won two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize—would have been utterly unfazed. He had been in Gertrude Stein’s bohemian circle in Paris. F. Scott Fitzgerald once took a swing at him, and to MacLeish’s credit, he responded with a blow that knocked Fitzgerald out cold. A triumph of poetry over prose, as it were.
Nor was MacLeish unsporting. Which may have influenced how the faculty chose to decide Corso’s fate—with an approach as unorthodox as Corso himself. Recollections vary as to the precise details, but either Finley or one of his section men offered Corso a challenge. He could remain at Eliot House for the rest of the semester if he wrote a play based on the Greek myths. He was offered two weeks in which to do so.
Corso did it overnight. And did it well.
His one-act play, Sarpedon, riffed on a minor character in the Iliad. “This brilliant yet little-known work clearly demonstrates the depth of his mastery of classical literature, no doubt picked up from auditing Harvard lectures as well as from the extensive reading he did in Dannemora,” wrote publisher Rick Schober in an introduction to the play, which was finally published by Tough Poets Press in 2016. (It was performed at least once in the 1970s, at Naropa University’s School of Disembodied Poetics in Colorado.) “Despite the ancient subject matter,” Schober wrote, “his verse is infused with street slang and Beat vernacular of the time in which it was written, and portends the irreverent humor that would become a hallmark of much of his later work.”
And Sarpedon enabled Corso to remain at Eliot House. MacLeish even enrolled him as a non-matriculating student.
Corso arguably made more of his time at Harvard than did most students. He successfully submitted poems to The Advocate and to a short-lived literary magazine with the unusual title i.e., The Cambridge Review. Both can claim credit for being the first to publish him, in the fall of 1954. His Eliot House friends undoubtedly had a hand in this, as Eliot resident Leo Raditsa ’56 was editor and Sedgwick associate editor of the Review.
Corso’s attendance at Finley’s lectures was also clearly influential to his burgeoning body of work. Part of what made Finley so compelling as a lecturer was not just his theatricality, but his ability to make historic texts relevant by connecting them to the lived experiences of the students. Aspects of his style turn up in Corso’s later work: the former in his energetic poetry readings, the latter in the mix of modernity with classical and literary references in his poems themselves.
Without having to worry about rent, Corso also partook of the rich social and cultural life of Cambridge. A girlfriend from that time, Cynthia “Cinder” Clark ’58, inspired one of his very few love poems: And you shall be the swan, my swan-girl / Of no wind or water; my swan-girl.
Meanwhile, the University, with its collection of treasures, gave Corso a sense of contact with his literary heroes. On one memorable occasion, his new friends brought him to Houghton Library, where he examined one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s notebooks. The experience inspired one of his much-anthologized poems, “I Held a Shelley Manuscript.” And it seemed to seep into Corso’s public presence, as well.
“Harvard was where he began to lean into his persona as ‘an urchin Shelley,’ that combination of Dickensian street waif and swashbuckling poet,” says Scrivani.
“You know how Shelley drowned with a copy of Keats’s poems in his pocket?” says Alice Sedgwick Wohl, a Radcliffe student who befriended Corso during his Harvard sojourn because he was living with her brother Bobby. “Every time we would go out sailing, Gregory would put a copy of Shelley in his own pocket, just in case.”
While Corso took to Harvard, Harvard also, unexpectedly, took to him. Finley, for one, could not have asked for a better addition to Eliot House—the young poet was like the house’s own Diogenes, in a borrowed coat and tie. Corso embodied Finley’s belief that students learned as much from each other as from their professors: he brought to his new friends an outsider’s perspective unlike any to be found on campus.
“He was a bit of a rascal, a street kid…He was seen as this exotic phenomenon.”
—Alice Sedgwick Wohl
“All the clubbies with intellectual interests found him fascinating,” Wohl recalls. “He was a bit of a rascal, a street kid, pixieish, puckish. He was seen as this exotic phenomenon. People loved him.”
And Corso’s literary style exposed the students of his day to language they wouldn’t have typically found in the Harvard curriculum. “People were beginning to be less exclusive and open to other possibilities and voices,” Wohl says. “The values with which we had been brought up no longer corresponded to the world as we found it. People and society were floundering a bit. Things that we had learned didn’t seem to be as relevant.”
If Corso had arrived a few years earlier, Harvard might not have been ready for him. A few years later, and he might not have made as much of a splash.
“The hipster language that he imported [by way of Black jazz musicians] was utterly new to Harvard Square,” Sayre wrote in her memoir. As was Corso’s twist on it, a mix of classical references and street slang. “His style and idiom became contagious for some restive undergraduates.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that Harvard launched Corso’s literary career—beginning with his transition from janitor at the Poets’ Theatre to playwright. Another one-act play, In This Hung-Up Age, was produced there alongside works by MacLeish and T.S. Eliot.
Soon after, Corso’s friends from Eliot House and the Poets’ Theatre also raised funds to privately print his first book of poetry—similar to what Poe’s West Point classmates had done for him 124 years earlier. Richard Brukenfeld ’55 led the effort, and Nicolai Cikovsky ’55, Ph.D. ’65, designed the cover. The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955) predated Gasoline, Corso’s more famous work published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, by three years.
“The Vestal Lady shook those in the know,” says Scrivani. “People like O’Hara recognized in Gregory a distinctive and important new voice.”
But it was not universally lauded. The critic Reuel Denney dismissed the book in Poetry magazine, noting, “Corso cannot balance the richness of the bebop group jargon from which his manner cleverly derives with the clarity he needs to make his work meaningful to a wider-than-clique audience.”
The critic got it wrong, according to Carolyn Gaiser in “Gregory Corso: A Poet, the Beat Way.” The Beat crowd’s twist on bebop slang would soon become the national idiom.
Not long after the end of the academic year, Corso departed Cambridge to pursue the adventures that led to his extensive body of work: he published 13 books of poetry, two books of plays, and several collaborations before his death from cancer in 2001. Harvard became part of Corso’s story, and in turn, he became part of its history. He did not return to Harvard until 1959, when he and Ginsberg headlined a Harvard Law School event. In the intervening years, the court case over whether Ginsberg’s Howl was art or obscenity had raised the profile of the Beat poets from fringe countercultural writers to voices of a generation.
One can only assume Corso had more conventional accommodations on his return visit to Harvard.
