In the same poem, Ferlinghetti launches into an ecstatic litany about “kissing people and making babies and wearing pants.” This playfulness, along with the social commentary, drew many to the Beats in the mid-20th century. “Oh the world is a beautiful place,” declares one of the book’s most famous poems, “… if you don’t much mind/ a few dead minds… or a bomb or two.” Like Allen Ginsberg and many of the Beats, Ferlinghetti used his poetry to work through his anxieties over nuclear weapons. While he never considered himself a Beat poet, Ferlinghetti’s work in Pictures of the Gone World contains much of the movement’s signature elements, including social commentary. The first book published by City Lights in 1955 was Ferlinghetti’s own Pictures of the Gone World. Pictures of the Gone World by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |