Meet The Car Named For A Poem That Goes So Hard And Looks The Part: Cold Start

Cs Invicta 1
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Did you have to memorize poems for English classes when you were in, like junior high or middle school? Or if not English, whatever your native tongue happens to be? I did. And some of them got lodged in there so hard I still know them. One of them is Invictus by William Earnest Henly, (no relation to the shirt) and that poem goes hard. It’s a badass poem, the kind of thing you can recite to yourself when you’re picking yourself up off the ground, making it look worse than it is, before, whammo, you leap at that motherfucker and make him pay. There was a Buick that (just about) shares a name with the poem, and it definitely looks the part.

The name of the Buick was derived from the same Latin root as the poem title, and is just the feminine form of the same word. So I’m counting these two as nomenclature-siblings.

Let’s recite the poem right now, why not? Stand up, wherever you are (if you’re currently piloting a plane just do this over the intercom, but you can stay seated) and boldly belt out the following:

Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
      Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
      Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
      I am the captain of my soul.
Oh, hell yeah! You ARE the captain of your soul! And look at this Buick, the Invicta:
Cs Invicta 2
I mean, that looks like a car that has not winced nor cried aloud under the bludgeonings of chance.
Cs Invicta 3
Even from the back you can tell that in the Craigslist ad selling this car it’ll say “has unconquerable sole” and yes I know that’s misspelled but it’s a Craigslist ad, what do you expect?
Typographically, I appreciate how the Invicta doesn’t need to bludgeon you, as cruel chance did it, with a badge that crows about its inherent toughness. It’s a script badge, common for the era (1959-1960) and demonstrates a quiet confidence and elegance I appreciate: Cs Invicta 4
That badge doesn’t need to be formed of clunky, massive block letters; this is much more potent, containing a sleeping strength, like water for fire. That “I” sure looks like a “J” but not much you can do about that.
Cs Invicta 5
Look at that determined brute. Bloody, but unbowed. Also an absolute nightmare to park and a dinosaur, mechanically, but who cares?
Now get out there and take no guff.

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Mercedes Streeter

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55 thoughts on “Meet The Car Named For A Poem That Goes So Hard And Looks The Part: Cold Start”

  4. “Yeah Buddy my name is INVICTA…just like I’m about ta inflicta lotta pain on ya head.
    Gotta problem wid dat?”

    “Uh no. Sorry Mr. N. Victor”

  5. Invicta is also the motto of the County of Kent and Dover Castle, and Invicta was a British car company between 1925 and 1950. It strikes me as an odd name for a Buick, not really fitting with Century, LeSabre and Electra.

  6. Funny. I hated these cars at the time, but now in the era of anonymous blobbery I am acquiring a taste for them. Conventionally attractive or no, at least there was an attempt at identifiable individuality.

    1. Jabberwocky would be a tough one. Good for you! The more important question is what would a car called the Jabberwocky look like? Weird, yet agressive?

      3. Jabberwocky would be ideal as a name for a small urban delivery vehicle, maybe something like a Piaggio Ape.

        Usage: “I’m going to nip down to Melonworths in the Jabberwocky to deliver these loaves. Tell the blokes to wait for me to return before heading to the pub.”

  10. In an episode of the first season of MacGyver (1985-86) set in “French North Africa” where MacGyver breaks Q, no, I mean Discord, no, I mean John de Lancie out of a prison there’s a sinisterly flat-black ’59 Buick Invicta being improbably used as a taxi; it actually very nearly upstages a lovely and well-used red-maroon ’63 Citroën DS, no mean feat, indeed.
    http://imcdb.org/i074208.jpg
    http://imcdb.org/i074207.jpg
    Speaking of upstaging and Citroën DSes, I’ve asked this before, here & over at the old site & elsewhere but with nary any responses, but does anyone remember the ad campaign for the Oldsmobile Intrigue when it first came out in the mid-90s? They had a number of commercials in heavy rotation on TV playing on a James Bond-type theme of international espionage featuring the Intrigue. They had one commercial that I only ever saw twice, despite the other commercials being shown ad (ha) nauseaum, where they showed the Intrigue being pursued by an all-black Citroën DS through some foggy European city. The couple in the Intrigue makes a successful getaway while the pursuers, clad in all black, get out of their DS and gesticulate in frustration. The second time I saw the commercial I was with someone not at all versed in cars who made a comment about finding the all-black DS being more…intriguing than the hero Intrigue. Then I never saw that commercial again, perhaps as if they realized the error of pitting an Oldsmobile against a Citroën in a battle of, uh, coolness. I’ve found the other commercials on YouTube but I’ve never found that particular commercial or even references thereof anywhere online so I’ve always wondered if it was actually a figment of my imagination, my co-witness notwithstanding.

    1. That’s a great episode, full of highly improbable but still great improvisations (or perhaps just really gullible guards) and pretty ’80s-tastic cold war double-dealing.

      I do remember those ads, just like I remember Patrick MacNee pitching Sterlings in the late ’80s with an even more on the nose vibe. “You were expecting someone else?”

      1. Ha, yeah, pretty much all of MacGyver is 80s-tastic but some episodes are more so than others… they’re all entertaining, that’s for sure! Like, there’s an episode in the first season, The Thief of Budapest, which used extensive clips of the chase scenes with the three Minis from the 1969 film The Italian Job. A real hoot to watch, especially if you’re familiar with The Italian Job.

        1. First couple of seasons, where he’s a government agent or where he and Pete just start with Phoenix, are the best…things get diluted later on when it’s more social issues de jour (hey kids stay away from those drugs/gangs/polluters!).

          I still often carry a Swiss Army knife around b/c of that show…it made a big impact on me as a kid.

    2. I got a little fixated on Citroën DS ads on YouTube one day last week (French car pubs from the ’60s were nouvelle vague as all get out), but I don’t remember anything like that popping up in my search results.

  11. As far as poems go I prefer Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner which IMO is best told by THE Bruce Dickinson and friends.

  12. The Invicta script is pure 60s optimism.

    The Estate Wagon rendering has something uncanny going on. The tail should be receding into the distance, yet seems to be bending around to meet me, as if the perspectival vanishing point is set at infinity in a slightly curved space-time.

    The red and rosy-gray(?) paint on the 4-door, set into the shape defined by the edges of the tailfins, suggests beautiful art pottery, a light glaze outside, but inside the bowl a rich, deep color. (Or maybe just “prestige designing.”)

    Finally, may I suggest the Buick Excelsior! With the exclamation point, please. Longfellow has written the ad copy.

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44631/excelsior-56d223cb4e6fa

    And it’s not an “E” word, but for us guys getting on in years, the Buick Thanatopsis.

  13. A buddy at my previous job had a ’60 Invicta 4 door hardtop with the 401 Nailhead and Twin-turbine Dynaflow transmission. It was one of the coolest cars I’ve ever been in.
    Buick Dynaflow transmissions were dragged back in the day for being slow, but that’s unfair – they were built to be smooth and luxurious, using their extra-fancy torque converters to do the torque multiplication instead of changing gears in the transmission. As a consequence the experience of a full-throttle acceleration was very different than what we’re used to today; instead of revving the engine out to redline and then chirping the tires on the shift to second gear, the torque converter of the Dynaflow let the engine rev up to its torque peak (and a 401 made a *lot* of peak torque) and then just held it there while the vehicle accelerated – it felt like a giant hand in the small of your back pushing you harder and harder as the car sped up. More like a jet on a takeoff roll than a car. So while a Dynaflow equipped Invicta might not have set stopwatches on fire during performance tests, I can tell you the car feels awfully fast in the real world, even by today’s standards, when driven on the road.
    That old ’60 Invicta was an unrestored ‘barn find’ car, and it was in rough shape cosmetically, but she sure did run – and one ride in it put a Nailhead/Dynaflow Buick right up near the top of my wishlist of classics I want to own one day.

      1. Yes, the Dynaflow is basically like a hydraulic CVT, but I can assure you that accelerating with a high compression 4 barrel 401 Nailhead at its torque peak is a much more pleasant experience than using a CVT to hold some tinny little 4 cylinder screaming up at its power peak.
        I’m also not really giving the Invicta its full due, performance-wise. The Dynaflow is actually a 2 speed automatic, but it doesn’t shift gears automatically – if you just put it in ‘D’ the transmission is in high gear (1:1 ratio) and the torque converter does all the work. If you want to, though, you can start in Low and shift up to ‘D’ yourself; if you do that, the Invicta was among the fastest cars to 60 mph at the time. Redline in first gear just so happened to coincide with 60 miles per hour… one car magazine at the time recorded 0-60 in 9 seconds, which was pretty hot for 1960!

        Another bit of Invicta trivia I love – Buick did a marketing stunt where they drove a ’60 Invicta non-stop around Daytona for “10,000 miles in 5000 seconds”, only stopping for tires and driver changes. To manage the feat they did car-to-car refueling on the racetrack at speed! https://www.hemmings.com/stories/buicks-innovative-1960-torture-test-at-daytona/

        1. 10000 miles in 5000 minutes. I had to look it up because my brain was trying to figure out how they did 2 miles / sec. They averaged 120mph to get it done in 5000 min, still insanely impressive for the time.

          1. You’re right of course! I should have checked my units. It looks like my ‘edit’ window for my original post has run out, or I would have corrected it. But yes, they managed to average 120 mph for 10,000 miles straight. Pretty impressive!

  15. That last image of the front view of this Buick has me imaging how cool it would be if they could have done the hidden headlights like the the 60s Rivieras

  16. Hmmmm… I was walking the earth when this Buick came out, and ever since then my take on it has been far less unconquerable soul and far more flamboyant executive.

  17. I need to get back into reading poetry. I feel like majoring in English burned me out on it and I just never went back, but there are so many great poems I haven’t read in so long (and so many more I haven’t read). Thanks for sharing a great poem and associating it with a very nice car.

  20. “Invicta” is too good of a name not to reuse (as are Electra, and, frankly, Riviera) but, instead we get low energy substitutes in terms of Encore and with regard to Envision.

    1. They’d first have to make a car that deserves to wear those names, but yes, I agree. Electra is the obvious choice for the name of a flagship EV Buick, for instance.

  21. Reminds me of the first family car I can remember, a ’59 Catalina coupe, built on the same platform as the Invicta. My five older siblings could fit across the back bench–until they couldn’t–while I sat on Mom’s lap in the front. That beast was replaced by a ’66 VW bus.

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