Long Live Man was published by New Directions in 1962 and represents Corso at full maturity — the wildness of Gasoline tempered (but not tamed) by European travel, wider reading, and an increasingly confident formal sense. It includes several of his most anthologized poems and demonstrates that the Beat poets were capable of development, not merely repetition.
The Poems
“Marriage” — Corso’s most famous single poem (though sometimes collected in The Happy Birthday of Death, 1960): a comic meditation on the institution of marriage that moves from social satire (“Should I get married? Should I be good?”) through surrealist fantasy to genuine pathos. It is one of the great comic poems in English and simultaneously one of the most honest about the loneliness that underlies the joke.
“Man” — the title poem, a celebration of human existence that refuses both optimism and pessimism in favor of sheer wonder at being alive.
“Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway” — Beat mythology rendered as lyric: the road, the freedom, the precariousness.
“After Reading ‘In the Clearing’” — Corso’s response to Robert Frost, arguing (with characteristic impudence) that he admires Frost but doesn’t want to be him.
The collection shows Corso absorbing classical influences — Shelley, Keats, the Elizabethans — without losing his street energy. The poems are more varied in form than the early work: sonnets alongside free verse, meditations alongside rants.
Context
By 1962, the Beat Generation was simultaneously famous and fragmenting. Kerouac was drinking; Burroughs was in Tangier; Ginsberg was in India. Corso was in Europe — Paris, Athens, various Italian cities — living on nothing, writing steadily, and developing a reputation as the most difficult and most brilliant of the group.
New Directions’ publication was significant: James Laughlin’s press was the home of Pound, Williams, and the modernist canon. Moving from City Lights to New Directions signaled that Corso was being taken seriously beyond the Beat scene.
Collecting Long Live Man
First edition (New Directions, Norfolk, Connecticut, 1962): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Identification points:
- New Directions imprint
- First printing (no reprint notices)
- Approximately 90 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $100–$300. New Directions first editions from this period had modest printings.
Signed copies: $300–$700. Corso signed generously.
The collection’s inclusion of “Marriage” — one of the most frequently anthologized American poems of the postwar era — gives it particular significance for collectors who seek first book appearances of major poems.