Harvard and Radcliffe students, notably Grand, Sourian and Sedgwick, underwrote the printing expenses of Corso's first book, "The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems". The poems featured in the volume are usually considered apprentice work heavily indebted to Corso's reading. They are, however, unique in their innovative use of jazz rhythms—most notably in "Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, musician," which many call the strongest poem in the book—cadences of spoken English, and hipster jargon. Corso once explained his use of rhythm and meter in an interview with Gavin Selerie for Riverside Interviews: "My music is built in—it's already natural. I don't play with the meter." In other words, Corso believed the meter must arise naturally from the poet's voice; it is never consciously chosen. In a review of "The Vestal Lady on Brattle" for "Poetry", Reuel Denney asked whether "a small group jargon" such as bop language would "sound interesting" to those who were not part of that culture. Corso, he concluded, "cannot balance the richness of the bebop group jargon... with the clarity he needs to make his work meaningful to a wider-than-clique audience." Ironically, within a few years, that "small group jargon", the Beat lingo, became a national idiom, featuring words such as "man," "cool," "dig," "chick," "hung up," etc. Despite Corso's reliance on traditional forms and archaic diction, he remained a street-wise poet, described by Bruce Cook in "The Beat Generation" as "an urchin Shelley." Biographer Carolyn Gaiser suggested that Corso adopted "the mask of the sophisticated child whose every display of mad spontaneity and bizarre perception is consciously and effectively designed"—as if he is in some way deceiving his audience. But the poems at their best are controlled by an authentic, distinctive, and enormously effective voice that can range from sentimental affection and pathos to exuberance and dadaist irreverence toward almost anything except poetry itself. Marian Janssen, in her biography of Isabella Gardner, details the relationships that Corso established with the more traditional literary society at the onset of his career. During his time at Cambridge, Corso met Robert Gardner, a member of the elite upper class “Boston Brahmins.” Gardner became a sponsor of sorts to Corso and briefly provided him with financial support.