George Corso’s Poetry Echos the Kennedy Assassination
The ideas of civilization and progress were greatly challenged as a result of Kennedy’s death. Ironic that as a president Kennedy had spoken of progress, and yet his death seemed to be a regression to something uncivilized, something primitive. As David Frost said on the British TV show That was the Week that Was on November 23rd, “It was the least likely thing to happen in the whole worldâÂ?¦ we just didn’t believe in assassination anymore, not in the civilized world anyway” (qtd. in United Press International 66). The majority of Corso’s poem reflects this idea. He recounts ancient cultures and civilizations from the “Evolution of the Rocks” to “every King every Pope every puny/clubbed-foot Elect” (Corso 142). Corso travels the annals of history trying to create some worse crime than Kennedy’s assassination by “pee[ing] upon the Evolution of the Rocks,” by “pummel[ing] [his] Colt .38 into the iron skin of the Palaeolithic/muralist!” (141). And in the end, his “thousand years attempt at being/the Great Assassinator/ has failed” (143). The use of these earlier civilizations portrays the juxtapositions of past and present, savagery and civilization that many Americans felt.
The irony of such a horror happening when people felt assassination just wasn’t possible anymore echoes in the speech Kennedy never had a chance to give, “We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility-that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint-and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of peace on earth, good will toward men” (qtd. in UPI 129). This idea and hope for peace was shattered by “the sad,” “sick,” and “damned juxtaposition” of “punk and PresidentâÂ?¦bullet and flesh” (Corso 141). Americans were left in shock by these harsh juxtapositions and sought ways to mourn properly in the face of this unexpected tragedy.
The nation began to seek guidance from the past, a past that had also faced the assassination of a larger-than-life president. Many editorial cartoons published across the United States on November 23rd show images of Abraham Lincoln hovering in the sky with JFK over the Capitol Dome, or portray Uncle Sam crying over two caskets, one with Lincoln’s name and the year 1865, and one with Kennedy’s name and the year 1963 (Rajski 40-41). Corso also follows this pattern. Many of the images he uses in his poem reflect images used by Walt Whitman in his collection of poems commemorating the death of Lincoln. Probably the most famous Whitman poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” portrays Lincoln as the deceased Captain of a ship. “O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,/The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won” (Whitman lines 1-2). Corso also uses this captain image in his poem pertaining to Kennedy. “The captain should go down when his ship goes down/But when the captain diesâÂ?¦the ship sails on-” (Corso 141). Corso also uses images of stars throughout the poem, and in the end links them with the captain image. “When a captain dies/The ship doesn’t sink/And though the crew weeps the loss/The stars in the skies/are still boss” (143). Whitman also used stars in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” another poem commemorating Lincoln.
Throughout the poem he talks of Lincoln as the “powerful western fallen star” (2.7). But the most jarring image is, like with Corso, the last few lines, “Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,/There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim” (16.205-206). Since Whitman was obviously an influence on Corso (as evidenced by the cover of Corso’s Mindfield) it is likely he, like the rest of the United States, looked back on a time in history when a very similar event had happened and sought guidance and perhaps inspiration.
These juxtapositions of past and present also set up the question that many Americans feared, what was the future now? In the midst of a Cold War that at any moment could erupt into nuclear warfare, the changing of leaders made the future even more tenuous and uncertain. Though Corso traverses the annals of time in his poem, his direction is fully forward. In the beginning, he announces he has the ability to see a future that others cannot see. “I with chiromancerian eyesâÂ?¦I laugh my purpose in dopey disguise/Who’ll see this/or that/or where-they’re-at/bereft of such eyes?” (140). There is little hope in the future Corso sees. He speaks of Kennedy’s death as the beginning of the fall of everything. “And so Kennedy and so America/and so A and so B and so C/With a full arrow and Ã?½ bow I’ll lay em low” (143). In other words, starting with Kennedy’s death everything else begins to fall apart too. Many Americans felt this distrust in the future as well. In an article in The Observer on November 24th, 1963 one man wrote, “there is a feeling that the future has been betrayed” (qtd. in UPI 133). An article in the St. Louis Dispatch asked, “What is wrong with the United States that it can provide the environment for such an act? There is a sickness in the nation when political differences cannot be accepted and settled in the democratic way” (132). Nikita Khrushchev, Premier to the Soviet Union, even voiced his opinion of an uncertain future due to Kennedy’s death stating in a telegram to Lyndon Johnson, “The death of J. K Kennedy is a hard blow to all people who cherish the cause of peace and Soviet-American co-operation” (135).
Political cartoons also mirrored this uncertain future. Many cartoons featured U.S flags in tatters, a smoking gun underneath the flagpole, or the words “hate and prejudice’ following the lines of a bullet that cuts through a flagpole, causing the flag to fall (Rajski 92-93). One of the best examples of this rocky future is a cartoon from the Atlanta Journal. It portrays a tree in a storm, just barely holding onto the ground by the end of its roots. The tree is labeled ‘continuing processes of government.’ These cartoons reflected a nation in mourning and unsure of where they would go once the mourning stopped. For a President who announced in his inaugural address “âÂ?¦only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility-I welcome it” (qtd. in UPI 142), his death left American wondering who would stand up and welcome that responsibility in the absence of their youthful leader. Bruce Catton writes in Four Days about the uncertainties Americans felt toward their new leaders:
Americans, still held in dumb attentiveness at their television sets, watched the parade of the new order, and recalled Johnson had a heart attack in 1955. Next in line of succession was John McCormack, a man seventy-one years of age, then Carl Hayden, eighty-six years oldâÂ?¦Americans could hardly help but recall Kennedy’s youth and vigor. (UPI 54)
Corso’s poem foresees American as being ‘laid low,’ and it is no wonder he foresaw destruction in the face of the new administration that seemed old and weak compared to the youthful image of Kennedy.
Another facet of the Kennedy assassination that runs both through Corso’s poetry and the American response is the idea of importance in one life. Early in Corso’s poem he writes, “No man’s the whole bit/But that young President was more than a little bit” (141). We get the idea that Kennedy was more important than just one man, more a part of the whole “bit” that the rest of us. This idea was also summed up by David Frost who stated, “Yesterday one man died, today in American sixty lost their lives in a fire. Yet somehow it is the ONE that matters. Even in death, it seems, we’re not equal. Death is not the great leveler. Death reveals the eminent” (qtd. in UPI 66). Corso’s ending the poem by the ship continuing on without its captain reiterates Frost’s idea that death reveals the eminent. Corso takes these feelings a step further, lamenting his own unimportance going so far as to find the sun unimportant in the face of Eternity. “So small am I to the proportion of so small a tree/And a sun so small in that sunny sea called Eternity/âÂ?¦O so small am I and smaller the things I eat and believe/O tiny Adam O shrimp Eve/” (143). The hugeness and enormity of such an act made Americans feel small and insignificant in the wake of Kennedy’s death, a man who is perceived as having done so much for the state of the U.S and the world.
The days of and after Kennedy’s assassination were days that startled a whole nation, and even the world. The death of Kennedy to many was like, in Corso’s words, “the uncreation of the world” (140). They faced shock, mourning, and an uncertain future. Corso’s poem “Lines Written Nov. 22, 23- 1963 -in discord-” capture many of the emotions Americans were feeling as they learned of, as Sean O’Casey wrote, “a cruel, foul, and most unnatural murder” (qtd. in UPI 46). Corso’s poem also exemplifies the spirit of uncertainty and nostalgia that occurred in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Sources Cited: Corso, Gregory. “Lines Written Nov. 22, 23- 1963 -in discord-” Mindfield. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989. Rajski, Raymond B, Ed. The Nation Grieved: The Kennedy Assassination in Political Cartoons. Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1967 United Press International and American Heritage Magazine. Four Days: The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy. American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1964 Whitman, Walt. “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: W.W Norton and Company, 2002.
