MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Poetry and pugilism mix it up much like literature and baseball do. In fact, by the time that Bart Giamatti, Renaissance scholar, was made Baseball Commissioner in 1989, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel had long since cemented this curious link between literati and America’s pastime. The connection between poetry and pugilism dates much further back, notably to boxer John Gregson’s 1810, “British Lads and Black Millers,” penned to celebrate the victory of Tom Cribb over his American challenger, Tom Molineux. But this improbable and permanent parallel really came to flower through the curious flourish of Cassius Clay (aka Mohammed Ali), whom A.J. Liebling critiqued as “poet and pedagogue” in a 1962 essay of the same name. While most people can quote the first half of Clay’s most famous couplet, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see,” they fail to recall the stylings and performance of poetry that Clay negotiated as he worked his way to become the best known fighter of all time. The writers knew though. This paper will examine the ways that A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, and Tom Wolfe captured the spirit of Ali as poet in the 1960s. This paper will also examine the diverse ways that Ali crafted himself as poet-pugilist, recording the album, I Am the Greatest, for Columbia Records in 1963, blending trash-talk and comedy to reinvent the image of the boxer and his sport, evolving the genealogy of poet-pugilists, from Gregson to Arthur Cravan, and altering the relationship between poetry and boxing, so that it became a key part of his boxing persona, unlinking what was seen in his predecessors. Finally, this paper will consider how Ali’s poetic stylings became inseparable from the overall image he cultivated of himself as “the greatest.”