War & Peace Quote by Gregory Corso

Corso delivers biography like a busted knuckle: quick, blunt, and still swelling. The line’s engine is the dark joke of “back home” colliding with “out of the World War.” As if geography and fatherhood could function as a loophole. That fantasy is immediately punctured: “But no way - they got him anyway.” The passive “they” matters. It’s not a villain with a face; it’s the state, the draft, the machine that claims bodies regardless of private plans. Corso’s dash turns inevitability into timing: a beat where hope flickers, then gets snuffed.

The subtext is that rescue isn’t rescue when the larger apparatus stays intact. His father’s attempt to reclaim him from the orphanage reads as an act of tenderness and guilt, but it’s also a naïve wager against history. The war drafts the father; poverty and neglect draft the son. “He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets” is structured like a causal chain with no ornament, making institutional abandonment feel procedural, almost administrative.

Context sharpens the sting. Corso, a Beat poet, came up amid postwar American triumphalism that often airbrushed the collateral damage at home: broken families, kids sliding between orphanages, juvie, and sidewalks. The Village, mythologized as bohemian refuge, appears here not as a playground for art but as a coordinate in a map of dispossession. The intent isn’t self-pity; it’s indictment by understatement, a refusal to romanticize suffering even as it becomes the raw material of a poet’s voice.