Since its initial publication in 1958, Gregory Corso's surreal and ambiguous ode to the destructive power of the has consistently aroused extreme reactions in its readers. In a 1959 Time magazine one reviewer scathingly quoted from Bomb's enthusiastic final lines as a prime example of Beat blather that, in his eyes, was certainly not literature but was excellent for recitations in the bathtub (Bang, 80). Corso's presentation of the poem to a poetry group at New College in England was met with frank hostility, ending with Corso and Allen Ginsberg being heckled and bombarded with the shoes of the offended members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Moraes, 67). In contrast to this negative reception, Ginsberg defended the poem in extravagant aesthetic terms, arguing that it just reduces the to insignificance because the poem is greater than the bomb (Horovitz, 67). Even Ginsberg's reaction, however, fails to acknowledge that the poem is more than just a powerful, provocative, and often amusing piece of poetry. Corso's style is wild and impressionistic, but Bomb nevertheless articulates sophisticated social and religious questions that continue to plague us even after the fear of total nuclear holocaust has been eased somewhat by the end of the Cold War. Though Bomb over• flows with surreal juxtapositions and farcical absurdity, the humor is not an end in itself but rather a tool to destabilize the reader's ingrained assumptions about nuclear apocalypse. Only after the reader has been disarmed by Corso's often hilarious treatment of a matter that is still deadly serious does the poet slip in the powerful, underlying central image the as a bringer of ultimate chaos, the brake of time itself, a postmodern god for a world that at Hiroshima suddenly realized its potential for self-annihilation. Yet Corso does not leave the reader to morbidly ruminate over these dark images. Instead, the poet recovers his sense of humor, courting the with a passionate love letter and finally launching into a wild celebration of destruction, reminiscent of a small boy's delight with a home chemistry set: