In these lines from the Beat poet Gregory Corso's 1958 poem ‘Bomb’, Corso describes the nuclear bomb as a part of Nature, rather than presenting it as synonymous with the human's conquest of the natural world. The poem depicts Nature as an ecological system that at once contains and defies the nuclear threat. Corso's choice of ‘inviolate’ establishes a strength and resistance at the core of the poem's vision of Nature, while the bomb's ‘gown of dynamite green’ implies that the nuclear bomb either originates in Nature, or has been deliberately adorned in order to appear as if it had a ‘natural’ origin. The poem therefore suggests that the bomb is a part of Nature, or that it is being passed off as such. The reading that the bomb's origin lies within Nature is further encouraged by the address ‘O spring Bomb’. The association of spring with the birth of new life hints that the bomb has been born out of Nature, as part of the season of birth, while the reference to the cyclical timeframe of the four seasons contributes to the poem's wider depiction of Nature as expansive enough to contain the nuclear. Corso firmly establishes this image of Nature as the Bomb's progenitor later in the poem, through the biblical and prophetic: ‘Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb’. The poem therefore goes as far as to provocatively depict the ‘earth’ as the mother of the nuclear bomb, while also portraying the bomb as a part of an expansive, ecological system of Nature.

Corso's presentation of the nuclear as both originating from, and contained within, an infinite ecology, constitutes a consummate exemplification of Timothy Morton's ‘dark ecology’. The poem's location of the nuclear within an ecological Nature also echoes those depictions of the ‘anti-ecological’ nuclear bomb as contained and neutralised within an infinite ecology that characterise the work of the writers discussed in each of my chapters. This ecocritical reading of Corso's work is both facilitated and contextualised by knowledge of the ecological presentations of Nature in the work of Corso's contemporary Cold War writers.