Chapter - I11

Poetry for the People - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry the common carrier

for the transportation of the public
to higher places
than other wheels can carry it
Poetry still falls from the skies
into our streets still open . . . . . .
(Ferlinghetti

"Populist Manifesto")

Though often generally regarded as a poet of the Beat

generation by virtue of his bohemian outlook and because
tie aligned himself with the anti-establishment groups of
San Francisco writers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti stands apart
as a public poet and a social activist. Ferlinghetti has
always been bent on using his rich artistic talents for
effecting radical social change. He has been called
'a multi artist'' because there is hardly any area of
writing which he has not experimented with. As a public
poet, as a dramatist, as film writer and novelist, as an
abstract expressionist painter, and as editor and
publisher, Ferlinghetti has been in the thick of
activities since the early Fifties.

Like his great literary model and mentor Kenneth

Patchen, Ferlinghetti also has not been fortunate enough
to receive academic, critical attention, which his works
so deserved. Partly because of his

counter-culture

stance and partly because of his radical anarchist

position, Ferlinghetti has been too prone to be ignored by
so-called academicians and advocates of the official
culture. He is a prolific writer who boldly seeks the
Xirnbaudian goal "to change life". 2 His voluminous

contribution to ~mericanliterature spans over three

decades. This study, for several reasons mentioned
earlier, focuses mainly on his public and social poems,
to an almost total exclusion of his plays and prose
writings.

It would be desirable in

a study like this to

acquaint oneself with Ferlinghetti's background which will

help the reader to have a proper understanding of the
nature and significance of his poetry. As he spent his
early life in France, there is something of France in
Ferlinghetti the man and Ferlinghetti the poet, and if he
chose San Francisco as his permanent home it was mainly
because he found it "as exciting as parisw3, full of art
galleries and exhibitions. Little wonder that soon after

settling with his young wife in the city he found himself

drawn head-down into abstract expressionist painting.
Interestingly, Ferlinghetti tried to grasp the techniques
of modern art and sought to apply them directly in his
poetry and study their effect on poetry. Abstract
expressionist painters like Pierre Soulages, Franz Kline,
Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves
had tremendous influence on him, and he constantly tried
to equate poetry with painting, by making it appear like
painting, by the careful arrangement of words on the
printed page. His technique of dispensing with
punctuation marks and scattering words of the poem on the
page, instead of dividing them into stanzas, would,
Ferlinghetti believed, give his poem a special visual
effect. As Neeli Cherkovski says in her biography of the
poet, "his concern was for a pictorial perception formed
by the printed word" .

The following passage from "A

Sweet Flying Dream" in LandSca~eS of

(1979) shows how

. .

Llvlns And Dvinq

the placing of words on the page can

create an illusory impression of two lovers in a dream of

flying. The words are so chosen and arranged as to make
the readers feel as if they themselves are in a state of
dream flight

We
wafted easily
we
flew wingless
Full of air
our hair
bouyed as
We
trailed our

slim legs
in streams of silver air

Perhaps the best example of

"pictorial perception

formed by the printed wordn5 is "Poem 22" in A Coney

of the Mind

A doorstep baby cries

and cries again

1ike

a
ball
bounced
down steps
Ferlinghetti's interest in painting and his early French
background have gone a long way in shaping his poetry and
thought. Besides being fascinated by abstract
expressionists, he also found his mentors in the French
Surrealists like Apollinaire, Andre' Breton, Jacques
Prevert and Paul Eluard whose works he studied

assiduously.

He seems to have had a special liking for

Apollinaire and Prevert because his poetry evidently

acknowledges their influence.

It may also be noted that

he translated Prevert's ParOles into English.

Ferlinghetti's poetics of dissent and his subversive
stance toward art can be traced to Prevert. Like Prevert
and the great existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul
Sartre, Ferlinghetti is down to earth human in his outlook
on life and he has strongly endorsed their view of art as
wedded to society and human values.

This commitment to

the living world and its living conditions makes

Ferlinghetti truly a poet of the world. As he himself
says, "The poet is clearly not free to construct a tower
of art, but must work first to save the world by changing
it".6

Ferlinghetti assigns a very high position to the poet

as visionary and prophet.

His appreciation of Jacques

Prevert is founded on these qualities of the French writer

whom he describes admiringly as "a great "see-ern if not a
seer".7 He says that Prevert "writes as one talks while
walking"

.'

This is an acknowledgment that Ferlinghetti

received from Prevert the rdea of poetry as talk and it

implies that a poem serves its purpose only when it is

talked, only when it is taken off the printed page, out

into the street. Defending his view of poetry as streettalk Ferlinghetti says

It amounts to getting the poet out of the inner

esthetic sanctum where he has too long been
contemplating his complicated navel.

It amounts

to getting poetry back into the street where it

once was, out of the classroom, out of the speech
department, and in fact - off the printed page.
The printed work has made poetry so silent.9

The poet cannot fulfil his commitment to the world so

long as he remains indoors and reserves his lofty
utterances for the elitist class. The true poet comes out
of the world and belongs to the world and he conveys his
message to the world orally, making it reach the public
directly. The printed page doesn't stand between the poet
and the public.

Highlighting the areas of likeness

between Prevert and Ferlinghetti, Larry Smith says

Using the full range of spoken and verbal

dynamics, both poets are concerned with a
remaking of life through remaking art into an
immediate and functional means, one which
actually changes the nature of life by changing

our means of perceiving and expressing it.10

Recurrent Themes
Ferlinghetti is known throughout America as one of
its most popular public poets.

Standing well-grounded on

his anti-establishment anarchist faith, Ferlinghetti has

successfully used his poetry as an instrument to be used
against social maladies. The immense popularity enjoyed
by the public poets and the large crowds they drew after
them are sufficient proof that poetry can be "the common
carrier/for the transportation of the public to higher
places" . " The common themes we find in the public and
political poems since the 50s are the evils of materialism
and the dangers of capitalism which the anti-establishment
writers saw as the greatest threat to modern man. They
have all been one soul and one mind in vociferously
protesting against the official infrinchment upon
individual freedom and they have sought to realize the
Whitmanian dream of "a new race dominating previous ones
and grander far with new contests, new politics, new
12

literatures and religions, new inventions and arts".

A deep craving for freedom from all restraints, and

hopes for a new world order in Ferlinghetti often takes

the form of child-like innocent quest of an identity and

a simple but agonized look for an experience of that

indefinable joy which every child enjoys. This is
probably because of his difficult childhood which has left
in Ferlinghetti an indelible mark of sorrow. His idea of
freedom also reflects the early influence of Rimbaud whose
child-like quest of absolute freedom has struck deep notes
in Ferlinghetti's mind.

In "The Jack of Hearts"

Ferlinghetti universalizes the question of identity

Who are we now, who are we ever

(Wild Dream 1)

The poem closes with the poet dreaming of becoming

"the whole man/who holds all worlds together (Wild Dreams
5).

Though the search for an identity goes on with

unending anxiety, nevertheless, the poet is hopeful of
realizing the ultimate, and therefore he is waiting
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder

...

...

...

... ...

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

(Ur+.ey 49)

Ferlinghetti's poetry thus "embraces faith in the

freedom, spontaneity, and innocent questioning of the
child and a ready acceptance of the validity of
imagination".13
Perhaps the best expression of Ferlinghetti's
philosophy of life, his search for absolute freedom and
his delight in the simple beauty and wonder of life is
.found in the beautiful poem "Junkman's Obbligato"

Let us arise and go now

to the Isle of Manisfree
and live the true blue simple life
of wisdom and wonderment
where all things grow
straight up
aslant and singing
in the yellow sun

(Q2a.ey 59)

Modern man's quest for freedom often lands him on a

"Coney Island" and he finds himself alienated in a "world
awash with fascism and fear".l4

The anarchist love of

freedom in Ferlinghetti is confronted by the fear of

alienation, the stark reality which stares at him most
depressingly. The theme of alienation is a ubiquitous

phenomenon of Ferlinghetti's poetry and it sometimes

swings between personal alienation and alienation in a
mechanical, materialistic world.
Big S U ~ " , "Alienation

Poems like "Dissidents,

Two Bees",

Director of

Alienation", show how the fear of private as well as

social alienation is uppermost in the poet's mind.

Public poetry is strongest when it assumes the guise

of protest. As has already been said, Allen Ginsberg's

"Howl" set new records for the poetry of protest

ensured a secure place

and

for the poetry of social and

political criticism. Poets of the San Francisco

renaissance vied with each other in raising their voice
against America's involvement in Vietnam, and in revealing
the anomalies in America's foreign policies.
Ferlinghetti's fame as a public poet rests chiefly on his
political broadsides and his immensely well-known
"Populist Manifesto". Through his public poems
Ferlinghetti has attempted sincerely to awaken
consciousness against corruption, ecological dangers and
disasters, war, and religious hypocrisy.

He is

unscrupulous in his attack of political leaders whom he

has caricatured with skin-peeling satire. Like Ginsberg,
Ferlinghetti bombards both the Democrats and the
Kepublicans, as he believes that both are capitalists and

war mongerers. He is equally skeptical about the efficacy

of religion as it is guided by hypocrisy, rather than

faith.

The purpose of the study is to highlight these themes

in the poetic works of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which are
also the distinctive merits of his poetry.

To locate

these themes one has to journey through quite a number of

his poems as they lie scattered in all his works. As the
thrust is chiefly on the social and the political aspects
of his poetry, only those poems in which they are most
obvious have been examined. Poems in A Conev Island of
t.
he (1958) and Pictures of the Gone World (1955),

need special mention, because they reveai Ferlinghetti at

his best.

Some of the poems of these early vo1,umes are

comparable to the best in modem American poetry for their

exquisite lyrical charm. A detailed discussion of his
prose poems entitled

"Oral Messages" and a brief survey

of his political broadsides have helped substantially in

understanding the political philosophy of Ferlinghetti.
Similarly the public and political poems in QDen Eye
(2Den

(1961) and a few poems in Who Arp We Now

(1974) have also been discussed.

The Poem as Picture

Pictures of the Gone World (1955L

and A Conev Island of the Mind (1958)

Ferlinghetti's first collection of poems published in
1955 by City Lights Books marks his entry into active

public life.

Far from being a run-away artist,

Ferlinghetti wants very rmch to be in the midst of things,

really as a poet of engagement. Engagement, according to
Ferlinghetti, is one of the chief functions of art,
because an artist cannot disengage himself from life.

The poems in

of the Gone W o r n are

remarkable for their visual and sound effect, the

qualities Ferlinghetti values so much and to which he
remains indebted to E. E. Cumings and William Carlos
Williams, his great predecessors as well as to Prevert.
The poems are "open" like exhibited paintings, conveying
the message both visually and orally. Words spread out on
the page, deliberately to produce the desired visual
effect, remind us of colours splashed on the canvas.

The

abstract expressionist painter in Ferlinghetti is vividly

alive in these poems. His obsession with abstract
expressionist painting combined with his admiration for
Cumings and Williams may be said to have influenced the
structure of Picturw. The poems of Cummings in their

printed form look like "eccentric pages",15 thanks to his

preoccupation with typographical disarrangements.
Influenced by French calligraphists he arrests the
attention of the reader by breaking up his sentences, even
his words, with punctuation that interrupts and distorts
the line.

Both Williams and Cummings contributed to the

colloquialism of modern American poetry by defying age-old

conventions and bringing poetry nearer to the typical
American idiom. These poets showed Ferlinghetti that a
poem, even while it drives home a message, should look
beautiful. Thus Ferlinghetti, in the tradition of
Cummings and Williams, was looking toward a fuller
synthesis of sight and sound as is revealed in Pictures
Gone World.
Ferlinghetti's very first poem in Pictures

"Away

above a harborful" ( P i c t u a I), with its staggered lines,

is an example of his bold typographical delineation.
Conspicuously absent in Ferlinghetti's poetry are
traditional poetic devices such as meter, and uniform
left-hand margin.

In this poem lines are distributed on

the page in such a way as to mimic the shape of clothes

hanging on clotheslines:

a woman pastes up sails

upon the wind
hanging out her morning sheets
with wooden pins
0

lovely mammal
her nearly naked teats

throw taut shadows

when she stretches up
to hang at last the last of her
so white washed sins

(Pictures 1)

A notable feature of this poem is the attention

Ferlinghetti gives to sound and auditory figures of speech

like alliteration, assonance and consonance. Ferlinghetti
believes in the importance of sound in comunicating
poetry to the audience. The words and phrases in the
following lines have a delightful harmony of sound:

So caught with arms upraised

she tosses back her head
in voiceless laughter
and in choiceless gesture then
shakes out gold hair
while in the

reachless seascape spaces

between the blown white

shrouds

stand out the bright steamers

to kingdom come
(

Pictura 1)

The multi-syllabic sound echoes created by

"voiceless laughter", "choiceless gesture", and "reachless
seascape spaces" reinforce the oral quality of the poem.

Ferlinghetti's poetr] is essentially street poetry,

and therefore his poems are written mostly in the
colloquial language of the street.

Familiar

conversational expressions like "and not barking or

waving its funny tail or/ anything (Pictures 6), and
"let's lie down somewheres/babyn (Pictures 15) are
common in Pictures

It was in fact with fictures of the

Gone World that he emerged as a street poet.

5 " of Picturm Ferlinghetti declares that

"

In "Poem
A POEM IS A

MIRROR WALKING DOWN A STRANGE STREET". Ferlinghetti sees

life in all its hues and paradoxes mirrored in the street
and therefore he would drag poetry out of cloisters into
the open street, into the living world.

In "Poem 25" of s-

Ferlinghetti's view of the

world has a touch of irony because he finds happiness in

the world incongruously mixed up with unhappiness and

showing a touch of hell everywhere:
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing all the time
(Pictures 2 5 )
Ferlinghetti then lists a number of improprieties
"our Name Brand Society/ls prey to"

. . . its men of distinction

and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations

that our fool flesh

is heir to

(Pictures 25)

These lines clearly suggest Ferlinghetti's antiestablishment political view, because the custodians of
the establishment ("its men of distinction/and its men of
extinction/and its priestsn) are according to him
responsible for all the sufferings of "Our Name Brand
Society". The concluding lines of the poem reflect
Ferlinghetti's lively humour which is present in most of
his early poems:

Yes the world is the best place of all

for a lot of such things .

...............
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician

The word 'mortician' deliberately isolated from the

rest of the line is yet another typographical technique
employed by Ferlinghetti to achieve special effects and
emphasis.

The artificial emphasis on the lone word

creates in the reader an unusual feeling of the horror of

the mortician.
of Pictures

A similar example may be found in 'Poem 6'

and then the pool was very

still (pictures 6)
The word "still", standing isolated on the page
effectively suggests the stillness of the pond.
Pictures of the Gone World is Ferlinghetti's
surrealistic portrait of a world that is "gone". The word
"gone" might also suggest the typical 'beat' vision of the
world with all its complexities and incongruities. Poems
w15,,

v,18,1
and " 2 2 " have a different vision of the world.

For instance, "Poem 18", beginning with the isolated word

"London", is a funny little poem which satirises a model
who takes off her clothes and finds nothing underneath

there was nothing underneath

I mean to say

she took off her shoes

and found no feet
took off her top
and found no tit
under it

(Pictures18)

The meaning is implicit; the model lives only by her

apparel. So she "gave up modelling/and forever
after/slept in her clothes."

(Pictures 18)

Ferlinghetti makes uses of some common poetic devices

to explain the incongruities of everyday life in his
famous "Dadau poem in pictures. "Poem 2 3 " presents a
penetrating picture of the ironies of life. It is the
description of a funeral procession, and the poet puns on
the word "Dada"

Dada would have liked a day like this

with its various very realistic
unrealities

..........................
Yes Dada would have died for a day like this
with its sweet street carnival
and its too real funeral
just passing thru it
with its real dead dancer
so beautiful and dumb
in her shroud
and her last lover lost
in the unlonely crowd
and its dancer's darling baby

about to say Dada

and its passing priest
about to pray
Dada
and offer his so transcendental
apologies
Yes Dada would have loved a day like this
with its not so accidental
analogies

(Pictures 23)

The isolated word "analogies" is preceded by

"apologies",and both words are strengthened by the
multiple rhyming words "transcendental" and "accidental".
These devices and the slow-moving alternating short lines
with their alliteration and internal rhyme are some of the
techniques by which Ferlinghetti draws pictures of
contemporary life.
Ferlinghetti's second volume of poetry, A Coney
Uland of the Mind (1955), contains some of his most
famous poems, and they provide a more surrealistic and
satiric social observation. In Conev Island Ferlinghetti
assumes two important roles - the role of a surrealist
investigator and that of a social critic. His long
association with expressionist painting provides him with

"falcons of the inner eye"

(w25) to fathom the abyss

of human experience, but it also enables him to react

against social abnormalities. The development of his
concern for social values is a gradual one, but his social
and political consciousness does not

debilitate his

tendency to move deep into human experience or dwell on

various levels of consciousness. His own experiences give
him ample scope for introspection, and the absolute
fidelity with which he records them in poetry, makes his
poetry sometimes even more endearing and profoundly
interesting than the works of Allen Ginsberg.
The Sotial Relevance of Ferlinshetti's Surrealism
The influence of surrealism on Ferlinghetti is
profound, and a number of poems in

I s l a reflect his

"surrealist stance of engaged subversion directed against

social restraint and towards a vision of wonder and
transforming love".l6

The surrealist is pleased to

travel through the region of the subconscious, his inner

world, and as he draws substantially from subconscious
sources, his writing often becomes spontaneous or
automatic, creating a conglomeration of irrational analogy
and intuitive juxtapositions. Surrealism, as viewed by
Andre Breton, one of its progenitors, means a kind of
psychic automatism by which the poet verbally, and the

painter in colours, seeks to express the actual

functioning of thought. In his surrealist exercise the
poet is guided throughout by thought, to the total
elimination of reason. His faith is strong in the
personal mythology that dwells in the subconscious, and
his avowed aim is to release unfettered the thought that
otherwise goes unexpressed, unspoken.

The title of Ferlinghetti's collection A Conev Island

of the Mind itself is surrealistically imposing, as it
calls the reader off shore to the distant island of
the subconscious mind.

"The wounded wilderness of Morris

(m2 5 ) , "Kafka's Castle" with its "imagined

311, are all regions of the surrealist
mystery' (m
Graves"

world into which he descends. However, the thrust of this

study being on the socio-political relevance of
Ferlinghetti's poetry, it is uncalled for to dwell at
length on his surrealist experience.

At the same time, it

is also significant that Ferlinghetti uses his surrealist

preoccupations to serve the social purpose of his poetry.
Ferlinghetti himself says in a surrealist poem that he
sees the surface of the round world with "its clay males
and females", with its "sunday parks and speechless
statues", and understands that it is his country. So he
takes upon himself the task of charting the "surrealist

landscape" of America

and its America

with its ghost and empty Ellis Islands
and its surrealist landscape of
mindless prairies
supermarket suburbs
steamheated cemeteries
clnerama holy days
and protesting cathedrals

a kissproof world of plastic toiletseats tampax and taxis

drugged store cowboys and las vegas virgins
disowned indians and cinemad matrons
unroman senators and conscientious non-objectors
and all the other fatal shorn-up fragments
of the immigrant's dream come too true
and mislaid
among the sunbathers

(C!ZEy 13)

The surrealistic juxtapositions "mindless prairies"

and "kissproof world of plastic toiletseats tampax and
taxis" are instantly shocking and equally suggestive, as
they project man's mechanical existence in the modem
world. But the real merit of the passage is the accuracy
of the poet's social-surrealistic observation, and the

effectiveness of the presentation.

The telling satire in

the alliterative "plastic toiletseats tampax and taxis",

and the rhyming "prairies - cemeteriesu is worth
mentioning. There is also Ferlinghetti's characteristic
humour in the punning on drugstore (as "drugged store")
vestal virgin (as "las vegas virgins"), and cinema (as
"cinemad") .

Equally suggestive is Ferlinghetti's habit

of twisting a familiar saying in such a way that it means

much more than it actually means.

Unusual expressions

like "drugged store cowboys", "cinemad matrons", "unroman

senators" and "conscientious non-objectors" may be
considered. Equally interesting is Ferlinghetti's
presentation of Christ "looking real Petered out" (CQ~LQ!
16), and "televised Wise Men"

(m
69).

Even while relying extensively on surrealism,

Ferlinghetti tries to impart it a social meaning and
relevance, as is clear from the poem discussed above.

In

yet another surrealist poem Ferlinghetti creates a

surrealist spring of Itfurleaves and cobalt flowers", and
introduces surrealist meadows drained by a rain of
cadillacs

(w14).

He concludes the poem using an

imagery taken from the subconscious

while out of every imitation cloud

dropped myriad wingless crowds

of nutless nagasaki survivors
And lost teacups
full of our ashes
floated by

The image drawn from the subconscious reveals the

condition of the conscious world, a world that survived
the Nagasaki holocaust.

It is peopled with "wingless

crowds" of "nutless" survivors.

:/ '

e-P
Ferlinghetti is first and foremost a public poet, and
therefore the poet is a performing artist and an
entertainer. Introducing a circus image, Ferlinghetti
likens the public performance of the poet-artist to that
of an acrobat

Constantly risking absurdity

and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making

and balancing on eyebeams

above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot-tricks
and other high theatrics
and ail without mistaking
anything

for what it may not be

(w3 0 )
The task of the public poet, according to
Ferlinghetti, is not as simple, as it seems to be.

He

faces the constant risk of absurdity and death, because he

"performs

"

, and has to satisfy his audience. His

performance should be intelligible, and he has to maintain

perfect balance on the "high wire of his own making",
while he faces "a sea of faces, and paces his way

....".

The assonance of "climbs", "rime", "high" and "wire" is in

keeping with the requirements of a public poem.
Similarly, the last word "faces" of line 10 rhymes with
the first word "pacesu of line 11, yet another poetic
device Ferlinghetti is very fond of.

The "entrechats/and

sleight-of-foot-tricks",just like the "foot-tricks"

displayed by the acrobat on the circus wire, is the poetartist's experiments with various poetic devices in order
to entertain his audience.

In the final section of the poem, however,

Ferlinghetti presents himself as a committed, truly
plebian artist, a poet of the people

And he

a little charley chaplin man

who may or may not catch

her fair eternal form

spreadeagled in the empty air

of existence

(m
30)

The "Charley Chaplin" image is intended to evoke

sympathy in his audience, because as a "super realist",
the public poet is not sure of success in his attempts to
perceive "taut truth" and catch the "fair eternal form" of
Beauty.
Perhaps Ferlinghetti's first open declaration of his
plebian stance may be found in a poem in which he offers
tributes to Goya the great Spanish painter. The poem
reveals his whole-hearted conformation to the world.
Inspired by Goya's surrealistic etchings entitled

"Disasters of War", Ferlinghetti sharpens his social

consciousness, and identifies himself with Goya's " people
of the world"

Goya's vision of humanity thus

becomes Ferlinghetti's too:

In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
'suffering humanity'
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees

..................
and all the final hollering monsters

of the
'imagination of disaster'
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really existed
And they do
Only the landscape is changed
(G2Qey 9 )

"In his series of brutal etchings", says Neeli

Cherkovski, "Goya, who was known for his beautiful
portraits and soft lyrical canvases, was depicting the
savagery of war as graphically as possible and
illustrating how the Church as well as State was deeply
involved in war's horrors. The pictures cried for an end
to human slaughter".l7 Goya's ' imagination of disaster'
appears so "bloody real" to Ferlinghetti who places it in
the present day context. The surrealist coinages "cement
skies", "abstract landscape of blasted trees" and
"hollering monsters" are used to capture the horror of the
disaster.

Finally, considering the 17th century masterpiece in

the present-day American context, Ferlinghetti sees the
same "suffering humanity" in his country

They are the same people

only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
Illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more maimed citizens

in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America
(CQaey 9 )

Ferlinghetti's social consciousness is roused, and he

realises that the people depicted in the painting still
really exist in the "concrete continent" where he lives,
and undergo the same suffering, "only the landscape is
changed". The poet also mocks at the idiotic illusion of
happiness and the maimed citizens in painted cars that
outnumber the old tumbrils of the 17th century.

Ferlinghetti sometimes uses Christian imagery and

displays subtle humour in revealing the hollowness of
contemporary Christian faith. Quite interestingly, he
invokes the typical hip jargon in presenting Christ as a
hip guy in one of the poems in A Conev 1s-

Sometime during eternity

some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter

from some square-type place

like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

(m1 5 )
Ferlinghetti consciously uses the colloquial idiom
and the cofiversational style of language not only to
strengthen the oral quality of the poem, but also for the
cultural purpose of presenting the precarious position of
Christ among

Philistines. Words "guys", "the cat", and

"Dad" are well-known hip jargons. By retaining the hip

image of Christ and using the same hip-idiom,
Ferlinghetti describes the fate of the modern Christ
You're hot
they tell him
And they cool him
They stretch him on the Tree to cool

(m15)

'Hot' in the hip sense is 'mad', 'crazy';and 'to

cool' is to die. But Ferlinghetti's unusual sense of
humour is displayed when towards the end of the poem he
describes the rejected hip-Christ "on His Tree/looking
real Petered out"

(w16) .

In another Christ poem Ferlinghetti's humour turns

into unqualified fury. He makes a scathing attack of the
contemporary Church's misleading show of religiosity which
has made Christ flee the Church. In this poem
Ferlinghetti describes Christ as climbing down the Tree
and running away in search of some safer haven, out of
reach of the Christians

Christ climbed down

from this bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with handycanes and breakable stars
(

69)

The world of Christians which Christ views from His

Tree is an artificial world of gilded, tinsel, tinfoil,
pink, plastic, gold and black, powder blue Christmas

trees, electric candles, electric trains and clever

cornball relatives

(w69).

The "rootless Christmas

treesn suggest the rootlessness of faith, and the gilded,

tinsel, tinfoil plastic Christmas trees reveal that
Christianity is lifeless. Therefore Christ climbs down
and runs away. But there is nowhere he can flee. He
would better steal again into "Some anonymous Mary's womb:
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's won? again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Inrmaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

(w70)

The poet feels that it is crass materialism and

wordliness that control the Christian community. The

following passage shows how Christ avoids the so called

Bible promoters who criss-cross the land in cadillacs

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesman
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs

(Ccmey 6 9 )

The spiritual impoverishness and religious hypocrisy

of the Christian Church have always been favourite themes
with contemporary poets, not to mention the beats. But as
Dennis Lynch says, "Ferlinghetti's criticism of
contemporary religion "stems from his intense moral concern
about where "the Bosch-like society"18 is heading. In
an equally interesting Christian poem Ferlinghetti's
opposition to the ways of the Church is revealed in the
humourous description of the erecting of a statue in front
of a church

They were putting up the statue

of Saint Francis
In front of the Church
of Saint Francis
In the city of San Francisco

in a little side street

just off the Avenue
where no birds sang

~~ 17)
The isolated line "where no birds sang" which is
repeated several times in the poem echoes "And no birds
sing" of Keats' nLa Belle Dame Sans Merci", and it denotes
the conspicuous absence of nature's participation in the
work of the Church. What Ferlinghetti satirises is the
practice of putting up of statues of saints in every
street in a desperate bid to make money by way of
offertories. The Church needs money rather than spiritual
enlightenment. The poet's subtle sense of humour is
displayed in the following passage where 'wily' workers
hoisting up the statue with a chain and crane is
contrasted with the young priest propping up the statue
with his arguments

. . . the wily workers

who were hoisting up the statue
with a chain and a crane
and other implements
And a lot of young reporters
in button-down clothes

were taking down the words

of one young priest
who was propping up the statue
with all his arguments
(QUQ! 17)

Ferl'nuhetfi's"Oral Messaues"
It has been pointed out that Ferlinghetti has always
considered music and sound as essential accessories to
poetry communicated orally. Some of his poems in "Oral
Messages" in A C o n ~ vIsland of the Mind are specially
designed for jazz accompaniment. Thus in 1958
Ferlinghetti performed as an oral poet at the Cellar in
San Francisco to the accompaniment of the Cellar Jazz
Quintet, along with poets Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth
Patchen. Fantacy Records successfully released his voice
in LP records. The poems thus recorded were "Oral Messages''
which were later included among Conev I s l a poems as a
separate section. The preface of the section reads thus
The seven poems were conceived specially for
jazz accompaniment and as such should be
considered as spontaneously spoken "Oral
Messages" rather than poems written on the
printed page . . .

The poems as a whole proclaim "the culture rebellion

that was going on throughout the country" and "the street
lingo of the Beat culture".
the title is significant

They are messages -

orally given to a "kissproof",

anxiety-ridden society, and they speak out "the truth of

common experience".2 0

The poems are often savored with

genuine satire.

It was part of the culture in the late Fifties and

Sixties that a11 anti-establishment writers, especially
poets, developed an intense liking for jazz. It was
mainly because this American music, developed from ragtime
and blues, and characterized by propulsive syncopated
rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of
improvisation and deliberate distortions of pitch and
timbre, most suited the counter-culture ethos. Jazz not
only provided musical flourish and pomp to public poetry
reading, it also served to accelerate the accent of social
criticism. Kenneth Rexroth, in great admiration of
Ferlinghetti's public renderings says that his poetry
"captures the rhythms of modem jazz, perhaps because he
shares so many of the deeper life attitudes of the beat
jazz musicians.*12'

Larry Smith writes

Using spontaneous rhythms and

deliberate satiric devices he creates
a convincing and appealing voice
that adds colour and dimension to
the poetry of social criticism.22
"Oral Messages" begins with the poet presenting
himself as writing hopefully for a change. Like every
American, who views cultural decay and social
disintegration seriously, he too has concerns about "the
concrete continent". but he still awaits a reawakening
I am waiting for my case to come up

and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier

............
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
(

"I am Waiting",

49)

These lines from "I am Waiting", with its repetitive

chants "I am waiting" first calls

to mind Ginsberg's

"America", which also expresses Ginsberg's expectation of

a re-birth. In his oral poems

Ferlinghetti deliberately

avoids his typographical tricks of loosely scattering

words on the page. But for the desired musical effect, he
supplies all the necessary oratorial ingredients like
alliteration, sporadic repetition of phrases, anaphora,
internal and multiple rhyme and ingenious use of puns.

In

"I am Waiting", each stanza ends with the repetitive phrase

"

a rebirth of wonder", which changes into " a renaissance of

wonder" in the last stanza, stimulating the expectations

of the reader/ audience. Similarly in "Junkman's
Obbligato", another oral poem in A Conev Island, the
"Let's go" anaphora with variations at the beginning of
each stanza as "Let's arise and gov, enhances oral
effectiveness.

In

"

I am Waiting", Ferlinghetti rouses

the expectation of the reader/audience by the remarkable

use of pun:
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting

for the Age of Anxiety

to drop dead
(

cmey

49)

(Pun on "the American Eagle", and " the Age of

Anxiety").
And I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
(cmey49)
(

Pun on "the Grapes of Wrathn)

And I am waiting

for the Salvation Army to take over

(

CQney 5 0 )

(Pun on "the Salvation Army")

"I am Waiting" with its colloquial idiom, provides

an interesting study of the common man's view of America

in post-war years. The common man, according to the
poet, expects "the Age of Anxiety to drop dead", a war for
safety to be waged, all present governments to wither
away, and a new system to be introduced

(w49).

This, it has to be said, is a characteristically beat

expectation of anarchic freedom. But in the same poem,
Ferlinghetti speaks of his realization of the absurdity of
this expectation and waiting. He is awaiting a
renaissance which, he knows, will never materialize,

because he inhabits a world where the human crowd wanders

off "clutching its atomic umbrella"

50). All the

allusions in the poem, and the elaborate puns on famous

titles and characters in literature reveal the absurdity
of human experience. The poem also satirically juxtaposes
Billy Graham with Elvis Presley:
and I am seriously waiting
for Billy Graham and Elvis Presley
to exchange roles seriously
(

Coney 49)

Ferlinghetti's expectation of anarchic freedom is

equally strong in the oral poem "Junkman's Obbligato", in
which in a vaudevillian style he reiterates his concept of
freedom. He urges those who "stagger befuddled in East
River sunsets" to "arise and go now".
Hurry up please it's time
The end is coming
(

conev

55)

Perlinghetti speaks of what he has always been

anticipating - - a beautiful blue world "behind the broken
words and woods of Arcady

Let us arise and go now

tc the Isle of Manisfree
and live the true blue simple life
of wisdom and wonderment
where all things grow
szraight up
aslant and singing

ir :he yellow sun

~~ 59)
"Manisfree" sounds like E. E. Cummings' "manunkind"
The "Isle of Manisf reel' is the " junkmanv-poet'svision
of the ideai world.

Ferlinghetti's faith in a

"transforming wonder" is coupled with "a belief in a

brotherhood of love",2 3

as is revealed in the poem.

Perhaps Ferlinghetti's most engaging oral poem is

"Dog" in which he ostensibly proclaims his mission as a
street poet. No other poem reveals better Ferlinghetti's
plebian attizude to life and art. According to
Perlinghetti, dogs are the most impartial, realistic
observers of life:
Dogs are the true observers
walking up and down the world
(

CQEY

63)

It is an absolutely free dog, walking up and down the

street, observing, investigating everything bigger than
himself and smaller than himself objectively without fear
of being muzzled:

The dog trots freely in the street

past puddles and babies
cats and cigars
poolrooms and policemen
He merely has no use for them
and he goes past them

But he has his own free world to live in

His own fleas to eat

he will not be muzzled
(

Conev

67 - 68)

The poet identifies himself with the dog, or he would

rather be the dog himself with his street poetry, "a real
live/ barking/ democratic dog/ engaged
enterprise/ with something to say"

in real/ free

(m68).

The dog is

truly is urban, and he trots up and down the city

streets. Ferlinghetti is the street poet of the cities
and all his major poems have a city background and

they

all depict his unwavering affection for cities like New

York, Paris and San Francisco.

The concluding lines of

the poem become the typical colloquial beat-street

jargon

a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with

Ferlinghetti loves being called a free man, as free

as "the live barking democratic dog"

(w68).

His idea

of freedom and his vision of an ideal world are his major

concerns in poems like "I am Waiting", "Junkman's
Obbligato", " Autobiographyu and

"Dog". He belongs to

"the American libertarian tradition",2 4 to quote Thomas

Parkinson, and he possesses an unflinching spirit of
individuality and independence. That is why in poems like
"Not like Dante", Ferlinghetti condemns even Dante's
Paradise, because even that paradise "is the perfect
picture of monarchy"

(-

28). He cannot tolerate any

authority superimposed on free will, and therefore he

would anticipate "a different kind of Paradiso" where
. . . there would be no fires burning

in the hellish holes below

in which I might have stepped

nor any altars in the sky except

fountains of imagination

(a
28)
In a Don Ouixote Countrv : Political Poems in Startinq
From San Francisco. (1961). O ~ e nEve ODen & a r t (1973).
W

Like Whitman, Ferlinghetti also believes in the role

of

the poet as the supreme agitator for the noble cause

of social justice. His politics as a public poet lies

rooted in his conviction that the natural goodness of
ordinary man is offset and obscured by corrupt
politicians, greedy religious leaders, and an equally
demonic capitalist economy.

Therefore he believes that

the present political system and the economic forces that

unite to annihilate all virtue from the face of the earth
should be destroyed. This desire along with his beatific
vision of an Eden, "the Isle of Manisfree" is very strong
in Ferlinghetti. In the Conev Islad poems he has
overtly expressed his vision, but in subsequent volumes
this vision is clouded by a deepening sense of social and
political disillusionment, caused by the spectacle of
steady deterioration.

Ferlinghetti's political poems share the common

themes of all politically committed poets of post-war
years.

Prouunent contemporary themes like the human

slaughter in Vietnam, American interference in Cuba,

nuclear arms race, overpopulation, drug abuse and
ecological aangers become issues in his volumes like
Startins Fror. San F r a n c i s c o (1961), The Secret k & u h g ~ X

w,(1968),Q D P ~Eve oDen Heart (1973) and Who are W e

m, (1976).Some of these political poems form part of
Startins Fror. San Francisc~as "broadsides", which
Ferlinghetti describes as "satirical tirades - poetry
admittedly corrupted by the political, itself irradiated
by the Thing it attacks" (Startina, cover). In these
broadsides Ferlinghetti condemns the idea of bigoted
nationalism "as an obsolete form of government and the
source of petzy rivalries which explode into intolerable
wars" . 2 5

What he celebrates as a free individual is a

non-totalitarian, non-authoritarian, non-political,

supernatural, humanitarian world.26

One of Ferlinghetti's famous political broadsides

"

Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the

Impeachment of President Eisenhower" is an insinuating

caricature of Eisenhower, who, like all presidents try

desperately to cling on to power:

And after it became obvious that the President
was doing everything in his power to get thru
the next four years without eating any of the
crates of irradiated vegetables well wishers
had sent him from all over and which were
filling the corridors and antechambers and
bedchambers and champerpots in the not-soWhite House.
(Starting 6 7 )
The main objective of this broadside, however, is to
express Ferlinghetti's growing concern about the threats
of nuclear armsrace.

In the following passage he leaves a

warning to Eisenhower about the ecological dangers an

atomic-nuclear war would cause

And after it became obvious that the strange

rain would

never stop and that Old Soldiers

never drown and that roses in the rain had

forgotten the word for bloom and that perverted
pollen blown on sunless seas was eaten by
irradiated fish who spawned up cloudleaf streams
and fell into our dinnerplates
(

Starting

66)

Ferlinghetti's polemic becomes severe when he

denounces American nationalism as

"idiotic superstition

which would blow up the worldf1because it is based on

military power (Startinq 6 6 ) .

He also characterises the

Voice of America as "the Deaf Ear of America" because it

is unable to listen to
the world"

"the underprivileged natives of

66).

The mythical Chinese dragon in the broadside "the

Great Chinese Dragon" becomes in Ferlinghetti's hand the
symbol of the question of existence of an un-American
race in the American soil. The Dragon which is believed
to have been towed across the Pacific long time ago, is
now in safe custody in the Chinatown of

San Francisco.

It is exhibited only once every year in connection with

the

Chinese New Year celebrations. Ferlinghetti again

deviates from conventional verse and takes a radically

different llne arrangement. The poem has "continuous
single-spaced lines beginning at the middle of the page
with every seventh or eighth line capitalized and starting

- at the far left margin."27

And the great Chinese dragon was therefore

forever

after confined in a Chinatown

basement

and ever since allowed out only

for Chinese New Year's parades and other

Unamerican demonstrations paternally
watched-over by those benevolent men
in blue who represent our more
advanced civilization which has reached
such a high state of democracy as to
allow even a few barbarians to
carry on their quiant native customs
in our midst
(Starting 58

The poet's sympathies are with the Chinamen while he

exposes the hypocrisy of American democracy clothed in
blue uniform. This poem and its companion broadside on
Fidel Castro justify Ferlinghetti's leftist politics. AS
was well-known, Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in San
Francisco was in the post-war years the favourite haunt of
leftist, anti-establishment poets and artists.
Ferlinghetti's own writings and his publications for City
Lights Books are generally leflist in their outlook.
Therefore, it is little wonder if he lionizes Castro and
pits him against American odds.

"One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro" was

written in 1961 immediately following Ferlinghetti's trip
to Cuba in order to report on the Cuban revolution. He
was actively involved in the Prograxrme of the Fair Play
foy Cuba Committee which held demonstrations and rallies
in support of the dialogue between U.S. and Cuba. Anti Castro sentiments were.strong in America, but the
committee criticized the American administration's
official standpoint about Castro as a communist spy and
his revolution as part of a worldwide communist
conspiracy. It appeared that no one was really interested
in knowing the cause of the revolution and suggesting ways
to redress the legitimate grievances of the Cubans. The
committee felt that
existing turmoil.

America was capitalizing out of the

Ferlinghetti's poem analyses the Cuban

crisis from a gentleman's angle, but it finds Castro

victimized and strangled. In the elegiac tone of
Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in /dooryard Bloom'd", and
freely mixing irony and satire, Ferlinghetti warns Castro
that his end is near.

His death is going to be like

Abraham Lincoln's because America is conspiring against

him. Anticipating Castro's death he writes:
They're going to fix you, Fidel
with your big Cuban cigar

Starting 77)

When the poem ends, the poet imagines Fidel's coffin

pass by:
Fidel. . . Fidel. . .
your coffin passes by
thru lanes and streets you never knew
thru day and night, Fidel
While lilacs last in the dooryard bloom, Fidel
your futile trip is done
yet is not done
and is not futile
I give you my sprig of laurel
(

Startinq 79)

The concluding line of the poem is an almost exact

reproduction of

"I give you my sprig of lilac" in

Whitman's "Lilac". This reproduction has another

objective. Ferlinghetti celebrates Castro as Whitman
celebrates Lincoln, and both join the rank of great
martyrs.

Commenting on the political views of

Ferlinghetti, Larry Smith writes:

This bold declaration, against the American
grain, which suggests Ferlinghetti's
growing acceptance of humanitarian
socialism as the best form of government,
earned

him the rancor of a great many

American political and literary critics

as well as the renewed attention of the

28

FBI.

The disillusionment Ferlinghetti feels when he finds

human rights violated everywhere makes his tirade against
violence and oppression severe. Anti-social elements
unleashing violence and indulging in a killing spree are
subjects of poems like
and

"Salute" in Q ~ e nEve ODen HearL

"Assassination Raga", in

w .In

me

Secret Meaning of

"Assassination Ragaw the first poem in Secret

m,
Ferlinghetti

is terribly moved by the murders of

John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and makes a "raga" of his

agony over the event. Supported by the intermiztent Sufi
chant "La illaha a1 lill Allah", the

"raga" describes the

funeral procession of the slain Kennedys. The famous

line

"The force that through the green fuse drives the

flower " from Dylan Thomas appears several times in the

poem with clever variations to suit the

spirit of the

raga :
The force that through the red fuze
drives the bullet
drives the needle in its dharma groove
(

Secret

4)

The poet who has been watching on the TV the funeral

procession

"through the dark land" gets fed up, switches

it off, and seeks solace from a raga on his sitar. In a

truly poetic spirit, the poet feels that man's final
resort is music which alone can confound violence:
as sitar sings the only answer
sitar sings its only answer
sitar sounds the only sound
that still can still all violence
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is no god but Life

Sitar says it Sitar sounds it

Sitar sounds on us to love love

&

hate hate

(Secret 9 )

Ferlinghetti's largest volume of poems entitled

Eve ODen H e a a is in part his confession of intense
personal crises following his divorce with his wife Kirby.
(

"People Getting Divorced" in

?w-

(1976) is

autobiographical). But personal and domestic problems do

not seem to have affected Ferlinghetti's public and
political interests much, if his "Public and Political
Poemsn in the third section of

can be any proof.

These poems are as Larry Smith says," various dated

affirmations and tirades of his basic humanitarian

socialist stance applied to new situations - Vietnam,
Greece, Spain, and the poor".29

Ferlinghetti's public poetry is the expression of his

direct "confrontation with street reality. It manifests
itself in a flow of common speech as the public poet
The

addresses and exposes the pretenses of the day".30

amount of vituperation and the energy of censorious
language is very high in some of these poems.
Tirade", for example, is a tirade of

"A Parade

"goodnights" and

"goodbyes" to an enormous list of men ranging from

"Sweet prince Kennedy" to crazy Karl Marx" (Open 7 4 ) .

The

whole poem of about 500 words is a single unit and is read

in a single stretch as it permits nowhere a pause.

It

runs into its climax without punctuation until the poet

looks into the future which appears bleak before him, and
therefore he bids adieu to his

"good old comrades": "The

good old days are gone forever so goodbye goodbye

. . . ' I

(QLf32 75)

Ferlinghetti's insinuating caricatures of political

leaders have won him accolades as well as anger even in
literary circles. His satirical portrayal of Ronald
Reagan as "the Gunfather" and

"the Tall Cowboy" in

er: Tale of the Cowboy (1981), and of Richard Nixon

as
?

" Old Swivelhead" and "Old Lionhearted" in

(1969). are well-known for their biting sarcasm.

In

"Where is Vietnam?", similarly, President Lyndon Johnson

is caricatured as "Colonel Cornpone", and is assailed for
his moral turpitude which he revealed through his
involvement in Vietnam. He is represented as
mispronouncing "Vietnam" as "Vietmind" and "Vietmine"
because he sought to slow down the world just long enough
to put his finger on

(m 78).

"the sore spot which is Vietmine"

But while doing so "the surface of the world

had suddenly become very very slippery with a strange kind

of red llquid that ran on it across all the obscene
boundaries"

78) .

The transformation of

"Vietnam"

into "Vietmine" by American atrocity, and the sore mine

through which human blood sprouts into the surface of the
world making it slippery for humans to walk on it are
images of cruelty drawn by the poet. They are too cruel
to assimilate, but nevertheless true.
In "Alaska Pipe Dream", Ferlinghetti's political
satire condemns the indifference of the governments of the
world to the question of existence. The poem also shows
how greed kills all goodness in man, and how it finally
takes the entire creation to the verge of doom. Oil flows

with blood in the poem, but it is not human blood, neither

American blood, nor Canadian blood.

The World's largest

Oil Spill near Alaska results in the mass destruction of

millions of creatures in the animal kingdom. But the
cruelty is not in the oil spill which

was caused by an

earthquake, but in the coolness with which both the

American and Canadian governments treated this natural
calamity, because after all "in any case the blood was not
the Canadian ministrys' blood, and it was not the American
people's bloocl"
.

( Q ~ Q

114).

Whose blood was it then?

. , it was simply the blood of one billion

waterfowl who had been unable to feed in the

tundra which had been disrupted by the perfectly
innocent Pipeline, and it was simply the blood of
one billion fish in Canadian waterways and one
billion fish in Canadian seaways who were no
longer able to eat the plankton now flavoured
with salted oil, and it was simply the blood
of

one billion deer in the Northern Territory

and one billion other wild animals in other

frozen territories in the Siberia of Canada

(m 114)

...

The crude, and sometimes even uncouth style of

writing which some of Ferlinghetti's public poems exhibit
reflects his frustration caused by the realization of the
futility of his protests.

He is not quite convinced of

the success his poetry might produce in contributing to a

change of attitude.

Ferlinghetti's political polemic is

always direct, and the ideas he expresses have always the

element of clarity.

Even in a poem like

"A World Awash

with Fascism and Fear", he quite bluntly states that some

of the so-called revolutionaries become corrupt, once they
enjoy the fruits of power. The radical Left, which once
stood for individual freedom, has sacrificed it for
revolutionary ends and fallen into fascist grip:
And this land runneth over with fascism

. .

. . .

. .

underground

Not to mention the Inside-out World

of great non-fascist governments
which can't exist without supporting
fascist paradises around the world

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where even the radical left is split
by Black Cleavers
suppressing individual freedom

&

overground

for revolutionary ends

And there are no ends
There are only means
even when the awful means
are awfully justified

(m90

- 91)

The repeated cry that rings throughout the poem is

that the country is awash, rotten with fascism and fear.
The whole world, in fact, turns on the axis of fascism,
and even the third world countries are now fascist, crying
for freedom:
And the Third World cries for freedom
and turns itself into

a Forth

and burns itself

(m8 8 )
While the world "rolls on lousy with fascism" and
"jails groan under its heaviness", the poet aligns himself
with those holding the red flag, to carry on the
revolution against fascism:
And
the

wherever there's a flag with red in it

people holding it up
groan with it
and every flag has red in it

And they wave it

it drops blood
upon them
The blood falls upon those from whom it is bled
from whom it is wrung
The blood falls upon those
about whom the song is sung

(m 8 8

89)

The anarchist's vision, as he himself is aware, is an

impracticable vision, yet he anticipates the dawn of a
society which enjoys freedom without restraints and
violence.

Ferlinghetti is therefore opposed to all

"agents of rampant national fascisms" who kill freedom.

The poet's incessant quest for uninhibited freedom which
he has nourished even from his difficult childhood can be
seen in the last lines:
as it still cries out
and still cries out
for freedom freedom
freedom

(w 9 2 )

Ferlinahetti's Views on Ca~italism

Ferlinghetti has always made his anti-capitalist
stance clear in his poetry.

He finds capitalism as "an

outrageously extravagant form of existence which is

leading to in enormous ecological debacle unless it is
completely changed" .31

Both Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg

have expressed their fears about the ecological dangers

the modern world is faced with in its frenzied rush to
progress.

Capitalism is founded on consumerism, and it

will finally consume the whole world. Some of his poems,

like the famous

I'

Autobiography" in u n e v Island,

therefore become diatribes against the evils of capitalist

economy.

In them Ferlinghetti also seeks to prove that

America's declaration of trust in God is meaningless,

because the Americans are

"gods unto themselves":

I have read the Reader's Digest

from cover to cover
and noted the close identification
of the United States and the Promised Land
where every coin is marked
In God we Trust
but the dollar bills do not have it
being gods unto themselves
(

63)

Capitalism, in Ferlinghetti's view, has now ended up

in sheer godless materialism, and materialism has taken
the masses to the infernal world

of consumer supermarket

where they:
Consume your way up
until you re consumed by it
(Who Are

In "Dissidents, Big Sur" in

We

Now 9)

Who Are We Now?

Ferlinghetti shows how capitalism with its keen eye on

industrial progress, is totally unconcerned about the
precious environment and the safety of the living beings.
The tiny humming birds in the poem which suddenly flitter
up as the American automobile monster makes its way up the
canyon road, backfiring and farting carbonmonoxide, are
poor representatives of all who suffer the bitter effects
of progress. The humming birds do not protest; they
simply "take flight/ in a flurry of fear/ a cloud of them
all at once/ humming away/ into deep blue air"

(m40).

But there are at least a few who defy the threat. Their
defiance, though week, shows that it is everyone's natural
right to resist any intrusion into one's legitimate
freedom:

. . . . a crowd of huge defiant

upstart crows
sets up a ravening raucus
caw! caw! Caw!
and screams and circles overhead
and pickets the polluted air
as the metal monster power-drives
on up the canyon
and over the horizon

( U u 40)

The lines show how as a populist artist Ferlinghetti

views commitment to social problems and the social need to
defy aggressive forces of destruction that threaten the
survival of all life, animal and human.
repeated William Burrough's words,

He has often

"only the dead are

disengaged" . 3 2 But he is, at the same time. aware of the

inevitable outcome; all dissident artists who are anti establishment are somehow ingested by the state, so that
they finally become the very "functioning part of w 3 3 the
establishment. The concluding lines indirectly point to
the same danger:
And the crows now too

wing away on wind

and

are sucked up

and disappear
into the omnivorous universe
Even as any civilization
ingests its own most dissident elements
(W&

41)

Remaining committed to his populist stance,

Ferlinghetti sternly warns all artists against the danger
of being "sucked up" by the omnivorous" government, and
government-run agencies. The caveat is pertinent, since
Ferlinghetti has long been fighting his battle along with
well-known poets against

"academic poetry". As he

believes that "poetry isn't secret societyw,and

temple either"

"isn't a

6 2 ) , he would not like poets to be

too "academic" and remain indoors. He would rather have

them come out of their closets before Rome and San
Francisco burn:
Poets, come out of your closets,

open your windows, open your doors,

You have been holded-up too long
in your closed worlds.

. . . . . . . . . . .
The trees are still falling
and we'll to the woods no more.

(XhQ

61)

Ferlinghetti feels that time is ripe now to face

outward in the full lotus position with eyes wide open:

The hour of 'oming is over,

the time for keening come,
time for keening

rejoicing

&

over the coming end

of

industrial civilization

which is bad for earth

&

Man.

HLQ

62)

Further revealing his antipathy to capitalism,

Ferlinghetti describes in poems like

"Two Scavengers in a

Truck, Two Beautiful people in a Mercedes",

"Third World

"The Billboard Painters", how capitalism

Calling" and

paves way to social inequalities and widens the chasm

between the rich and the poor. In "The Billboard Painters"
the two sign-painters "on the high/ scaffold suspended/
on the huge/ billboard/ beside the elevated/ freeway/, are
painting "a snapshot landscape of/ a South Sea island
beach", with a sunburned
white beach

"North American couple on the /

28)

. However, "that paradise on

earth", was accessible to the poor

"white-capped

signpainters" only in their imagination, because they were

only painters, and not the sunburned North American couple

on the white beach.

'"mo Scavengers in a Truck, The

beautiful People in a Mercedes" is an even more poignant

portrayal of the unbridgable division in society. On the
one side there are two garbagemen in red plastic blazers
on board a garbage truck, and on the other, an elegant
couple, in an elegant open Mercedes:
The man
in a hip three-piece linen suit
with shoulder-length blond hair

&

sunglasses

The young blond woman so casually coifed

with a short skirt and colored stockings

. . . . . . . . . .
And

the two scavengers up since Four A.M.

grungy from their route
on the way home

The words

"coifed" and

(Landscape 26)

"grungy" make the contrast

zelling. Now as the truck and the Mercedes are both

pulled up at the red signal, the four are for an instant
brought close together. The strange juxtaposition,
according to Ferlinghetti, most effectively illustrates

" . . . that great gulf in the high seas of this democracy"

(Landscape 27 )

Assessment
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as Thomas Parkinson says, "is
an engaging writer".34 He possesses an infallible love of
humanity which encompasses even the animal world as proved
by his "Dog" poem. He is a great lover of uninhibited
freedom, and in his poetry he unambiguously speaks of his
vision of an ideal world. But his anarchist vision is a
pacifist vision, and he has always been a staunch advocate
of non-violence. He has always been a poet of the cities;
pictures of rural life are seldom found in his poetry.

In his long literary career, Ferlinghetti has made a

cautious attempt to develop an independent poetic style.
At the same time, he has never been reluctant to
acknowledge his indebtedness to poets whose style and
techniques he has emulated. Ferlinghetti's readers can
discover in his poetry the poetic qualities of Pound,
Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Apollinaire, and more appreciably
the living presence of Whitman, Cummings, W.C. Williams,
and Ginsberg.

Similarly, though Ferlinghetti is known as

a member of the Beat group, he does not always conform to

the Beat culture and philosophy. He has always tried to
be an independent street poet, and his popularity also
rests chiefly on his oral poetry. At times he has also
made known in his poetry his reservations about the beat

style of life:
this unshaved today
with its derisive looks
that rise above dry trees
and caw and cry
and question every other
spring and thing
(Coney 34)
Ferlinghetti does not quite deserve the beat stigma
35

of "a bush-league sick poet of a sick poetic movement",

because his poetry is not contemptibly mean and his ideas

are not mediocre. He is well-read in the art and
literature of old and new, and his works make constant
allusions to artists like Goya and Picasso, and to great
men like Thoreau, Eliot, Dante, Keats, Kafka, PrOUSt,
Tolstoy, Freud and Joyce, whose work he has read.

He has

been strongly influenced by painting and music, and

perhaps one of the most

remarkable qualities of his

poetry is its proximity to painting. His poems are

sometimes called verbal photographs by virtue of their
pictorial quality and graphic descriptions. The beauty of
his poetry, apart from other qualities, arises chiefly
from its brilliant visual imagery and sycopated jazz
rhythm.

Ferlinghetti's more recent anthology of poems

entitled

"Endless Life: Selected Poems (1981) includes

some of his best poems written over a period of thirty

years, and selected by Ferlinghetti himself. The poems in
this collection "reflect the abiding concern throughout
Ferlinghetti's career with not only political matters but
36

with the nature of beauty and the poetic imagination".

Ferlinghetti is without doubt one of the most remarkable

among contemporary American poets. He has great faith in
poetry as

"the common carrier/ for the transportation of

the public/ to higher places". He is still hopeful about

"Whitman's wild children" to arise and herald a new
America :
Where are Whitman's wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it
And our relation to it

Poets, descend
to the street of the world once more

And open your minds

&

eyes

with the old visual delight

Clear your throat and speak up
Poetry is dead, long live poetry with terrible eyes and buffalo strength.
"Populist Manifesto"
(Who Are We Now?,

63)

Notes
Larry Smith, Lawrence Ferlinahetti. Poet at Large
(Carbondale and ~dwardsville: Southern Ilinois UP, 1983)
ix .
Larry Smith, x.
Neeli Cherkovski , Brlinahetti
York

Doubleday,

: A

Bioara~hv (New

19791 69.

Neeli Cherkovski, 71.

Neeli Cherkovski, 71.
Larry smith, 55.
Quoted by Larry Smith from FerlinghettilsEnglish

,P
translation of P

5.

Larry Smith, 55.

Neeli Cherkovski, qtd. from Ferlinghetti ' s Chicam
Review, 5.
Larry Smith, 58.
Ferlinghetti, "Populist Manifesto".
l 2 Walt Whitman, Leaves

of Grass, Bradley Scully

Harold W. Blodgett. eds. (New Delhi

Prentice Hall, 1986)

27.

l3 Larry Smith, 59.

l4 Ferlinghetti, "A

Fear" .

&

World Awash with Fascism and

l5 Louis Untermeyer, ed. Modern &&erican Poetrv (New

York

Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1962) 469.

l6 Michael Skau, Constantlv Risking Absurdity : Tbp

Writinss of Lawrence Ferlinahetti (New York

The

Whitston, 1989) 3.
l7 Neeli Cherkovski, 92.
Dennis Lynch, Contem~orarv P o e B , Third Ed. (New
York

St Martin Press, 1991) 479.

Neeli Cherkovski, 93-94.

20 Larry Smith, 77.

21 Larry Smith, 79.

22 Larry Smith,79.
23 Larry Smith, 59.
24 Thomas Parkinson, m

ed. (Detroit

. . .
r v Cr~tlclsm,Robert V.Young.

Gale Research, 1991) 184.

25 Michael Skau, 10.

26 Michael Skau, 10.

27 Crale D. Hopkins, Poetrv Criticism, Robert V.

Young. ed. 173.

28 Larry Smith, 35-36.
29 Larry Smith, 140.

30 Larry Smith, 132.

31 Ferlinghetti in David Meltzer ed. "Lawrence

Ferlinghetti", The San Francisco PoeL (New York

Ballantine, 1971) 145.

32 Ferlinghetti,

" A Stance Towards Life and Art",

Larry Smith, Lawrence Ferlinshetti, 65.

3 3 David Meltzer, ed. 138.

. . .

34 Thomas Parkinson, in Poetrv Crltlclsm, 184.

. . .
35 James A. Butler, in Poetrv Crlt~clsm,169.

36 Thomas Parkinson, in Poet*

Criticism, 186.