Poetry
| “ | If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic. You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.... |
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—Lawrence Ferlinghetti. From Poetry as Insurgent Art . |
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Though imbued with the commonplace, Ferlinghetti’s poetry is grounded in lyric and narrative traditions. Among his themes are the beauty of natural world, the tragicomic life of the common man, the plight of the individual in mass society, and the dream and betrayal of democracy. He counts among his influences T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, H.D., Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Prévert, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars. One of his poems, 'Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes', is now a poem studied at GCSE level in England and Wales, as part of the collection of poems in the AQA Anthology. His famous poem "Just As I Used to Say', was published in 1976, when Ferlinghetti was at the ripe old age of 57.
Read more about this topic: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)