Christ Climbed Down

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
1958

INTRODUCTION

“Christ Climbed Down,” like much of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's work, is a poetry of social criticism forged in direct response to the culture it springs from. It is a poetry written in opposition to what the Beats, a group of artists (of which Ferlinghetti was a highly prominent member) called the “square” world (the mainstream), to which they counterpoised the “gone” world. Ferlinghetti's first book of poetry, published in 1955, in fact, was called Pictures of the Gone World.

The 1950s were a time of great social injustice in the United States. Racism, especially against African Americans, not only existed as a matter of fact, it was institutionalized and accepted, sometimes even celebrated, as a way of life. In addition to the institutionalized racism of the time, there was the continuous threat of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In America, money, brain power, and labor were dedicated to, or, some would have argued, sacrificed to the arms race—the attempt to build more deadly weapons than the Russians.

In reaction to this climate, the Beats flaunted a freedom from conformity. They lived communally on little money, disdained employment, and worked for money only when absolutely necessary. They broke with sexual conventions and racial prejudices, and sought to liberate an inner creative and spiritual force through art, often aided by mind altering substances like alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs. They were also, as a rule, pacifistic with regard to the Cold War and against militarism and regimentation in general.

Thus, very much rooted in this tradition, “Christ Climbed Down” employs the images of the conventional Christmas icons it satirizes and hopes to erase. Ferlinghetti does not disdain Christ or Christmas. He is instead pointing to their subversion by consumerism and materialism, a subversion that blocks the spirit from being expressed. One of Ferlinghetti's best-known and most controversial poems, “Christ Climbed Down” appears in A Coney Island of the Mind, a collection of Ferlinghetti's poetry, which was published in 1958 by New Directions and has not been out of print since then.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, on March 24, 1919, the youngest of five boys. His father, an Italian immigrant and auctioneer, made his fortune in real estate in New York and was providing handsomely for his family. Several months before Lawrence's birth, Charles Ferlinghetti died. Ferlinghetti's mother, Clemence, was ill equipped to support her family; she moved them to ever cheaper quarters until she was hospitalized and the family split apart. Ferlinghetti was taken in by his maternal grand uncle, Ludovico, and his wife, Emily. Theirs was a troubled marriage. When Emily left Ludovico, she took the baby with her and settled in Strasbourg in Alsace, France. Thus, French was Ferlinghetti's first language. Four years after leaving her husband, Emily returned to him and to New York. Ludovico, a language instructor at City College, taught Ferlinghetti English. When Ludovico lost his job and the family became impoverished, Emily placed Ferlinghetti, age six, in an orphanage.

Once Emily managed to obtain the position of governess for the wealthy Lawrence-Bisland family, whose forebears had founded Sarah Lawrence College, she brought Ferlinghetti to live with her at their mansion. When Emily left one day and did not return, the Lawrence-Bisland's adopted Ferlinghetti. After a while, however, he was moved again to live with another family, the Wilsons. He thrived in that environment, going to good schools and becoming an Eagle Scout. He also was a member of a

boys' gang and was once arrested for shoplifting. His scoutmaster bailed him out.

Ferlinghetti was then sent to a private boys's school, strong on discipline, in Connecticut. There he began reading literature seriously and engaging in intellectual and philosophical discussions with his schoolmates. He attended the University of North Carolina, where he worked on the student newspaper and began trying to write fiction. After his sophomore year, Ferlinghetti and a few friends bummed their way to Mexico. From there Ferlinghetti sent off stories on the social and political scene to American magazines like Time, but nothing was ever accepted. After college and a summer spent idyllically on an island off Maine, Ferlinghetti joined the Navy. It was 1941.

After the war, Ferlinghetti lived in New York's Greenwich Village, wrote derivative poetry and discovered the new American vernacular poets like Kenneth Patchen, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. He also worked in the mail room at Time magazine, and, although he continued to submit news stories, none were accepted. After tiring of his job, Ferlinghetti enrolled at Columbia University by using the G.I. Bill of Rights. There he became interested in painting as well as writing. After obtaining his M.A., Ferlinghetti left for Paris, still supported by the G.I. Bill, where he earned a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne. On one of his voyages back to Paris after a visit to New York, Ferlinghetti met Selden Kirby-Smith (Kirby), who became his wife and sometimes breadwinner as she brought in money while he wrote. In Paris, Ferlinghetti met the American poet, Kenneth Rexroth, who persuaded him to come to San Francisco, which was beginning to enjoy a literary and social renaissance, even while the United States as a whole was benighted and hobbled by the repressive conditions of loyalty oaths and Congressional anti-communist investigations.

In this climate, in 1953, with friend Peter D. Martin, Ferlinghetti began a magazine called City Lights, after Charlie Chaplin's film of that name. He opened the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and began a publishing company. City Lights Books became famous for its square shaped editions of poems by Williams, Ferlinghetti himself, and Allen Ginsberg, particularly his 1955, culturally revolutionary poem, “Howl,” which Ferlinghetti successfully defended in a court trial against the United States Government's attempt to impound and ban it. Since then, Ferlinghetti has been a cultural institution, running a bookstore and a publishing house, writing poetry and drama, and actively participating in protest activities against U.S. militarism and imperialism.

Ferlinghetti's first book of poetry, Pictures of the Gone World, was published in 1955. This was three years before A Coney Island of the Mind introduced him as a poet as well as a Beat bookstore owner and publisher. Nevertheless, it was A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which includes “Christ Climbed Down,” that brought Ferlinghetti lasting recognition as one of the principal figures among the Beat poets. It has sold over a million copies since first being published.

Ferlinghetti has also written several plays, among them Unfair Arguments with Existence (1963), and Routines (1964). In 1970, he published The Mexican Night, a travel journal. In 1998, he looked back to A Coney Island of the Mind in a book he called A Far Rockaway of the Heart.

On December 8, 2006, Ferlinghetti was made Commandeur dans L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the Minister of Culture of the French Republic. Later, in 2007, at the age of eighty-eight, Ferlinghetti released a book of prose called Poetry as Insurgent Art.

POEM SUMMARY

Stanza 1

The poem is a catalogue of variations on the theme that Christ stepped down from the cross as a protest against American culture. The first image of that culture is of “rootless Christmas trees / hung with candy canes and breakable stars.” It is an image of contempt for nature—growing pines for Christmas cutting depletes the earth and suggests the rootlessness of alienation—of shallow values and a lack of enduring things. Despite the seriousness of Ferlinghetti's criticism of middle-class American culture and the shallowness of American religion, the first stanza immediately reveals that Ferlinghetti will use satire to make his points. Saying something shocking is more palatable if it is said comically or made to seem a little grotesque. The image of Christ climbing down from the cross might at first seem blasphemous, but Ferlinghetti undercuts that negative possibility by showing immediately that his poemis not about Christ as much as about America. He offers criticism of American culture in the name of Christ.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• A Coney Island of the Mind is available as a recording on vinyl or CD from Rykodisc (1999). Ferlinghetti reads the poems from the collection, including “Christ Climbed Down,” while saxophonist Dana Colley plays jazz in the background.

Stanza 2

The second stanza begins matter-of-factly with the lines “Christ climbed down / from His bare Tree / this year,” as if reported by a newscaster. The tone gives a ridiculous verisimilitude to the image. The action is funny and ought to be startling, but the report of it is deadpan. The cross and the Christmas tree are both related to each other and separated from each other by Ferlinghetti's identification of the cross as a “bare tree” The cross is an emblem of spiritual redemption through suffering. It is an impoverished tree, a bare tree, a tree that has been killed. Its beams of wood have been hewn from nature to become instruments of torture. It is an abused tree. Yet the paradox of the cross is that the dead tree is a tree of eternal life. The tree, as represented by the Christmas tree, is not bare, but it is rootless and dead—it is temporary. The Christmas tree, which ought to suggest life's abundance and eternal hope, is shown here as representing impoverishment and emptiness of the spirit. As Ferlinghetti established in the first section, it is gaudy and far from eternal. In the second stanza Christ runs “away to where / there were no gilded Christmas trees” or in each succeeding line, where there are no “tinsel … tinfoil … pink plastic … gold … black” and “powderblue Christmas trees.” Ferlinghetti follows the catalogue of vulgar trees with the mention of clichéd accoutrements which add to the cheapening of the Christian sacrifice: “electric candles … electric trains … and clever cornball relatives.”

Stanza 3

The third stanza is essentially more of the same, a catalogue of references to stereotypical images, now not of Christmas trees but of a soulless country composed of pushy bible salesmen driving fancy cars, of plastic, that is, ersatz, representations of the nativity scene, of mail-order catalogues, of Christmas imagery prostituted by advertising—a whiskey commercial on television with the three Wise Men endorsing the brand, for example. In each instance, Ferlinghetti is showing how sacred things are commercialized and robbed of their sanctity.

Stanza 4

The litany continues with Santa Claus and consumerism being the objects of the poet's contempt and ridicule. Santa Claus is described as a “fat handshaking stranger / in a red flannel suit / and a fake white beard.” The image is boiler-plate; the contempt for it arises out of several things. Familiarity in its negative sense is suggested by the “handshaking.” It is familiarity, not contact or intimacy. Buried in the image of the “red flannel suit” is an allusion to a popular stereotype of the 1950s, the man in the gray flannel suit, who represented the junior executive in a corporation, an organization man whose life was regulated by his job. One of Ferlinghetti's criticisms of Santa Claus is that he is simply a version of the men who are owned by their corporations. Santa Claus, as the stanza ends, becomes a delivery man for the great department stores, his magical sleigh turned into a Volkswagen Beetle. The children are treated to such opulent gifts because of the religion of consumerism, of which they, not Christ himself, seem to be the divine incarnation. Ferlinghetti is not demeaning the story or spirit of Santa Claus but its debasement by a culture out of touch with the reality of the spirit and convinced only of the reality of material things.

Stanza 5

The next vignette shows how the spirit and the sense of wonder and longing associated with it are exploited in the garish and sentimental Christmas entertainments of show business. Ferlinghetti mocks the clichéd image of Christmas carolers by using the image of drunken carolers singing sentimental pop songs like those sung by one of the famous crooners of the time, Bing Crosby, who is mentioned in the poem. From that village image Ferlinghetti segues to the urban vulgarity of Christmas stage shows at movie palaces and actual church services that have become entertainment spectacles instead of spiritual ceremonies.

Stanza 6

In the final stanza, Christ climbs down from the cross but does not run away from things as in the previous stanzas but “stole away into / some anonymous Mary's womb again / where in the darkest night / of everybody's anonymous soul / He waits again / an unimaginable and impossibly / Immaculate Reconception.” Something is missing, Ferlinghetti is arguing, from the spiritual understanding and the religious celebration that surrounds him. He calls for reconceptualizing the way spirit is understood and celebrated, punning on the possible meaning of the word “conception” which signifies both the beginning of life and the process of thinking and imagining. What will make the Reconception of Christ immaculate is not that it will be the result of a virgin birth but that it will be celebrated cleanly, cleansed of the materialism and consumerism that debase the spirit and contradict what is eternal. When Ferlinghetti says “the very craziest of Second Comings,” he is using crazy not to mean insane but the way it is used to mean something out of the ordinary, at odds with how things are but better. Something crazy is something able to dislocate fustian attitudes.

THEMES

An Alternative World Vision

Although “Christ Climbed Down” presents a picture of a spiritually corrupt world governed by vulgarity, materialism, and conspicuous consumption; a world of many-colored Christmas trees, high-powered salesmen, mail-order religion, and intoxication rather than exaltation; its theme implies that there is an alternative vision possible. It imagines an “Immaculate Reconception” that will supersede the original birth of Christ, called the Immaculate Conception because it was a virgin birth. The reconception is not only a new birth or another birth, but a new idea of Christ, a new conception of the godhead. It will be immaculate, without a taint, because it will be without a taint of the influences Ferlinghetti has unrolled in the poem. Consequently, the implicit theme of the poem is a call for a human revolution in values which will transcend the base materialism and vulgarity Ferlinghetti describes. This change will alter the human attitude towards Christ as it is manifest in the celebration of Christ's birth. That will be the immaculate reconception. It will also signal Christ's second coming. The second coming is the awaited return of the Messiah. When Ferlinghetti describes it as “the very craziest / of Second Comings,” the word “craziest” suggests an event unlike the events he described in the poem, an event that both subverts what is and replaces it with something that is sacred.

Consumerism

Nearly all the things that Christ runs away from are consumer products. They are examples of vulgar conspicuous consumption, whether they are the variously designed Christmas trees, the Bible salesman's two tone cadillac, the glad-handing department store Santas, or the pageant at the Radio City Music Hall. The culture being celebrated is the culture of consumption, not the religion of sacrificing oneself for the good of others. Christ, then, the quintessential sacrificial figure, the Lamb of God, is, by definition, excluded from the Christmas celebration of His birth in the form Ferlinghetti is describing it, and reasonably gets down from the cross to try again.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Write a dialogue in which a rebellious person and a person who believes in strictly conforming to the values of society discuss the virtues of their positions and the problems with their opponent's position. Give them specific social issues to talk about to illustrate why they believe what they do. With a partner, perform this dialogue for the class.
• Research the Beat Generation and present a report to your class describing who they were, what they did, how they lived, and what the times were like in which they flourished.
• Research the growth and development of Christmas as a holiday in the United States. In your report, focus on how it was celebrated throughout the nation's history. Discuss the customs and traditions that have been associated with it. Has the tree always been a part of the celebration? What about Santa Claus? When did the intense commercialization of Christmas begin? How has Christmas been used in literature?
• Perhaps the most famous Christmas story is Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the most popular Christmas movie is Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. Comparing and contrasting these two works and Ferlinghetti's “Christ Climbed Down,” write an essay discussing how the novelist, the filmmaker, and the poet understand the meaning of Christmas and use Christmas in their analysis or criticism of social customs and institutions.

Debasement and Corruption

The vulgarity of the way Christmas is celebrated is emblematic in the poem of the debasement of human and spiritual values. Ritual and solemnity are corrupted and become vulgar displays as the various Christmas trees, the caroling and the stage show are drawn to be. The purity of a “White” is transformed into the sleaze of a “tight” Christmas.

Hypocrisy

Implicitly, the theme of hypocrisy threads through “Christ Climbed Down.” While the pretense is that the birth of Christ is being celebrated, the reality Ferlinghetti is trying to show is otherwise. Consumption and wealth are being celebrated in honor of a spiritual force—who decreed that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to gain entrance to paradise, and one of whose disciples argued that cupidity or covetousness lies at the root of evil.

Withdrawal

In Ferlinghetti's understanding of him, Christ disapproves of American culture in exactly the same way Ferlinghetti does. Christ's response to the culture he is conceived as condemning is to withdraw from it, to remove himself from the cross and seek a new life different from the one represented by gaudy Christmas trees, materialism, and vulgar celebrations. It is a nonviolent response. In the poem, Christ is not only used as the vehicle for Feringhetti's criticism of America but as an actual surrogate for the poet who symbolically acts as the poet in fact has acted in real life. Ferlinghetti withdrew from the mainstream American society, renounced militarism, renounced employment in corporate America. He withdrew, that is, from the world as it was and sought a reconception. He designed another world: opening an exclusively paperback bookstore before paperbacks became popular; writing poetry that was unlike the academic, hermetic poetry of his time; founding a small press that was not in business to make money but to make books; and associating with people who were artists and bohemians, anarchists and pacifists, who lived on the margins of society and were attempting to invent a new culture and to reconceive themselves.

STYLE

Repetition

Each of the six stanzas of “Christ Climbed Down,” except the last one, begin with the same four lines. The sixth stanza repeats the three first lines and varies the fourth. That minimal variation gives the poem a sense of movement. This sense of movement is particularly important because the primary structural feature of the poem is repetition rather than development.

Polysyndeton

Polysyndeton signifies a repetition of the word “and.” In “Christ Climbed Down” roughly one fourth of the lines begin with “and.” The most concentrated example is in the second stanza's litany of kinds of Christmas trees. The effect is to give the piece a rhythmic sense of forward thrust through a build up of examples, where each example must top the previous one in absurdity or vulgarity.

Satire

“Christ Climbed Down” is a satire of how Christmas is celebrated and of the values that govern society at the time of its composition, the mid-1950s. It is intent on making a mockery of what is acceptable practice with the purpose of eliminating that practice through the implicit criticism that resides in satire, of making it unacceptable by showing it to be ridiculous.

Colloquial Speech

At a time when poetry was defined by its difficulty, when obscurity could be seen as a mark of profundity, and when formal and metrical skills marked the quality of a poet as a poet, “Christ Climbed Down” flaunts all these criteria. The language of the poem is colloquial and sometimes even uses slang. Expressions like “ran away,” “covered the territory,” complete with “parcel post,” “televised,” “went around passing himself off as,” “some sort of,” and “craziest” govern the diction of “Christ Climbed Down.”

Cultural References

Rather than being stuffed with learned allusions and literary references, “Christ Climbed Down” uses common and familiar cultural references available to all of Ferlinghetti's readers, regardless of their level of education. In order to understand the poem, all a reader need know is the popular culture of the time, which, even if it requires some footnotes for twenty-first century readers, was entirely accessible to readers in its own time.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Advent of Television

The force of television in the 1950s as a determiner of social values and, as an instrument of cultural homogenization, is difficult to exaggerate. Although prototypes of television were on display in New York City at the 1939 World's Fair, it was not until a few years after World War II that television was introduced into the American home where it soon became a dominant feature of family life, a primary fashioner of individual consciousness, and a powerful influence on social values and habits. Besides programming, television brought entertaining advertising in the form of commercials into the home. Poets like Ferlinghetti and the Beats lived and wrote impelled by a desire to offer an alternative to mainstream culture and to weaken the burgeoning mass conformist and consumerist culture of television.

Advertising

Although advertising and public relations preceded and outlasted the 1950s as a powerful force in the American economy, culture, and politics, advertising achieved a social prestige in the 1950s that it had not had previously. Often referred to as “Madison Avenue” because of the New York City street where a number of advertising agencies were located, advertising became the fundamental mode of social communication. Glamorized in the mainstream of society, advertising and careers in advertising were vilified by social critics like the Beats. Much of “Christ Climbed Down” is dedicated to mocking advertising.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1950s: Beat poets meet in cellar clubs and read their poetry (commonly known as spoken word and believed to be a predecessor to rap) with jazz accompaniment. Their audiences and venues are usually small.

  Today: Rappers and hip-hop artists perform their rhymes to mass audiences in concerts and through mass distribution of their soundtracks.

• 1950s: Critics of American consumer society complain of the commercialization of Christmas.

  Today: Christmas has become even more commercialized, and some advocates of “traditional values” fear that Christmas has become secularized and is treated like a multicultural, seasonal celebration rather than a Christian holiday.

• 1950s: Televisions, carrying at most seven channels, are introduced into the home and change the way people live. Televisions are large, clunky machines usually housed in a table-topped wooden console.

  Today: There are hundreds of television channels and televisions are either portable or boast immense flat screens. Computers and cell phones can also display television shows.

The Beats

The original Beats were a group of friends, primarily writers, including Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouack, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Neal Cassady, who either attended or hung around Columbia University in New York City in the 1940s, both during and after World War II. They were inspired by their reading of literature and especially by the poetry of the French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), by the radical politics of the 1930s, by the experiments of painters like Jackson Pollack, and by their own sense of disaffection from their contemporary culture, which they found repressive, constraining, and hostile to experience. They cherished spontaneity and the sanctity of individual vision and desire in both life and art. They sought to transcend the racial and sexual prejudices that governed how people lived, and they sought to live as much as possible outside the money economy of conspicuous consumption and corporate employment.

Another similarly alienated and influential group of writers and intellectuals was forming around the same time in San Francisco, centered around the poet Kenneth Rexroth and the newly formed Pacifica radio station KPFA, begun by Lou Hill and a group of people whose politics were defined by their anarchism and pacifism. Ferlinghetti was among them. The opening of City Lights Bookstore by Ferlinghetti gave writers and readers a place to congregate. Ferlinghetti forming his press gave writers from San Francisco and New York a place to publish their work. The existence of the store and the press, as well as the tireless public relations work Allen Ginsberg carried on, turned the small literary movement into a national phenomenon called the Beat Generation. The popularity of Ginsberg's 1956 poem, “Howl,” and of Kerouack's novel On the Road, written in 1952 and published in 1957, also played a large part in bringing the group to prominence.

The term “Beat” is thought to have been introduced by the small-time hood and junky, Herbert Huncke, whom Burroughs met in Times Square in the 1940s. Kerouack picked up the term, and used it to suggest the sense of beatific or blessed, as well as beaten. On November 16, 1952, the writer John Clellon Holmes used the phrase in an article, “This Is the Beat Generation” published in the New York Times Magazine. The Beat style, wearing black, being scruffy, playing bongo drums, smoking marijuana, disdaining mainstream society and its values, caught on among high school and college students across the country by the late 1950s.

HUAC and McCarthyism

During the first half of the 1950s, the United States Government carried out investigations into people's political beliefs and political associations. In the House of Representatives such an investigation was carried on by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC. The committee had subpoena power and the power to order witnesses to jail if their answers to the committee members' questions did not satisfy the committee. From the floor of the Senate, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, accused a number of people in the government itself and in the Army's chain of command of being communists or sympathizers with communism. McCarthy's influence was so great that he gave his name to an era. The early 1950s are called the McCarthy era. Entertainers were banned from performing, school-teachers lost their jobs, and the general cultural tone was homogenous and conformist. In opposition to this social context, Beat writers like Ferlinghetti emerged.

Packaging

With the proliferation of supermarkets replacing small grocery stores, and the merchandising of prepackaged goods rather than fresh goods, as well as the increased importance of brand names that came about because of the spread of advertising on television, the package itself became the commodity. People were taught to purchase the package as much as the product that was being packaged. As in “Christ Climbed Down,” image became more important than actuality.

The Trial of “Howl” for Obscenity

As a publisher, too, Ferlinghetti played an important role in insuring freedom of the press. He was at the center of the trial in which the United States Government attempted to prevent the distribution of Allen Ginsberg's poem “Howl,” which Ferlinghetti had published in 1956 as Number Four in his Pocket Poets Series. For reasons of economy, Ferlinghetti had Howl printed in England. The first printing of Howl passed through customs in October 1956. In March 1957, the second printing was confiscated. On April 3, the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the legality of the seizure. On May 19, the San Francisco Chronicle gave Ferlinghetti a column in the paper to write in defense of the poem. On May 29, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco released the confiscated copies of “Howl” after he was advised by a Washington, DC, customs official not to take action against the book. But that was not the end. On May 21, a week before the second printing was released by customs, two plainclothes policemen bought a copy of Howl at the City Lights Bookstore. Afterwards, Ferlinghetti and the clerk at City Lights, who sold the book to the undercover policemen, were arrested. They faced six months in jail and five hundred dollar fines. Their trial began on August 22, 1957. It drew a great deal of media attention. In October, Judge Clayton W. Horn, a Sunday school Bible teacher, ruled in favor of the poem. Ferlinghetti had effectively defeated the attempt by the United States Government at censoring not just a poem but at inhibiting what was to become a culture-changing event.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

According to critic James A. Butler, in his article in Renascence magazine, Ferlinghetti was quoted in Poetry magazine in November 1958 as saying, “I have been working toward a kind of street poetry … to get poetry out of the inner esthetic sanctum and out of the classroom into the street.” Ferlinghetti adds: “The printing press has made poetry so silent that we've forgotten the power of poetry as oral messages. The sound of the street-singer and the Salvation Army speaker is not to be scorned.” It is probably for just this reason that, as Larry Smith wrote in a 1995 review of Pictures of the Gone World in the Small Press Review: “Ferlinghetti has never received his due as a poet.” Nevertheless, Ferlinghetti's poetry is appreciated by a vast audience of readers who have kept A Coney Island of the Mind in print since it was first published in 1958.

Ferlinghetti's poetry is also highly regarded by many of the poets who were his contemporaries. Barry Silesky, Ferlinghetti's biographer and author of Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time, quotes the poet Robert Creeley: “His poetry is … what [Robert] Frost always claims to have written. … It's a very subtle commonness of address, that makes everyone feel that they're not threatened by what he has to say. … He's also capable of an extraordinarily warm and terrific humor.” Silesky himself notes that “the often overt political attitudes in Ferlinghetti's poems … while contributing to the poems' popularity, are at the same time … partly responsible for the generally poor treatment he's received at the hands of critics.” The poet Allen Ginsberg, whose work Ferlinghetti's City Lights Press published over the span of Ginsberg's career, was good friends with Ferlinghetti, and he told Silesky that much of Ferlinghetti's poetry “depended on … witty references, the paraphrases and puns, and a sort of melodic cello feeling … but not enough pictorial” detail. Silesky also cites the San Francisco poet Michael McClure's statement that

Ferlinghetti's “influence has been primarily in initiating an enormous audience into poetry” on account of the accessibility and surface clarity of his poetry. The poet Anne Waldman confirms this, Silesky reports, by citing her own experience of reading “Christ Climbed Down”: “I distinctly remember reading aloud ‘Christ Climbed Down’ … Ferlinghetti's poem struck home. It had the litany-like cadence of formal church litany, it had a hypnotic quality, it was also outrageous and somewhat brave.” What Ferlinghetti is most celebrated for, Silesky quotes the critic Ralph Mills as saying, is the “exhilarating … sense of openness that came from his poems on the page—a visual freedom that went along with the directness of speech.”

No account of Ferlinghetti's significance to the renaissance in American poetry in the 1950s is complete without recognizing his importance not only as a poet but as a publisher. While many of Ferlinghetti's own books, like A Coney Island of the Mind, were published by the avant-garde New York City-based press, New Directions, a host of poets ranging from William Carlos Williams to Gregory Corso, and including Allen Ginsberg, were published by Ferlinghetti's own San Francisco-based press, City Lights Books. Ferlinghetti's idea was to make handsome, inexpensive pamphlet-like books of poetry that could be easily carried around. In addition, Ferlinghetti published poets who would have otherwise gone unpublished because Ferlinghetti saw his press as functioning outside the mainstream, and while he did not have the resources that bigger presses had in order to advertise his writers, his press gained a cachet among those in the know.

CRITICISM

Neil Heims

Heims is a writer and teacher living in Paris. In the following essay on “Christ Climbed Down,” he discusses Ferlinghetti's use of common speech in his poetry.

What Ferlinghetti wrote in A Coney Island of the Mind in 1958, including the poem “Christ Climbed Down,” was something new. It was not what poetry had been in the twentieth century until then. Poetry that was respected as poetry was difficult and elusive. It was poetry of hidden meanings, learned allusions, and distance from the object of its discourse. It was poetry that might just as easily exist in a void as in a social context. Modern poetry, Ferlinghetti wrote in 2001:

has suffered from a kind of exhausted or “defeated” romanticism. We heard it in the 1920s in T. S. Eliot's Waste Land (especially in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), in Ezra Pound's Cantos that couldn't possibly be sung [a canto in Italian is a song] and in the increasing stoicism, if not cynicism, of many who came of age during the war or returned from it with radically changed perspectives. … Politically, it all started with the disillusionment of intellectuals with the Communist dream in the 1930s … In the postwar years, this led to increasing resistance to commitment of any kind, in literature as well as in politics. And it was a part of a growing alienation of artists and writers from mainstream society.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Edgar Z. Friedenberg's The Vanishing Adolescent (1959) is a study of adolescent culture and rebellion in the context of the American social and economic institutions of the 1950s.
• Allen Ginsberg's poem “A Supermarket in California,” first published in 1956 by Ferlinghetti along with Ginsberg's revolutionary poem, “Howl,” in The Pocket Poets Series, Number Four combines a meditation on what it is to be a poet within the context of American consumer culture as exemplified by a supermarket.
• Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, written in 1951 and published in 1957, aside from Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” and Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind, is one of the defining works of Beat literature.
• “Every One of the Cleaning Women” is the last poem in the 2001 collection Love and Politics. Written by Judith Malina, a cofounder, with Julian Beck, of The Living Theater, it juxtaposes the youthful dreams of women workers and the life that economic necessity forced upon them with the poet's own life as a bohemian radical. Malina brings to the poem the common diction and the common concerns that recur in the kind of poetry Ferlinghetti wrote, as well as the radical social consciousness that he presents in terms of everyday experience.
• J. D. Salinger's classic coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), depicts the breakdown of a boy caught in a conflict between his idealism and the materialism of post-war American culture.

Ferlinghetti and those who thought like him about poetry, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, for example, wrote with a conscious opposition to the intellectual, academic, disembodied, and remote poetry of the time. They strove for immediacy and sensation and for a quality that might be called down-to-earth in their poetry. They wanted their poetry to swing, to be lyrical and committed, engaged in a cultural overthrow of what they saw as a spirit-killing culture run in the interest of vulgar materialism and which spawned and supported injustice, nationalism and war. They wanted to make a poetry that did not ignore the body and that unshackled the mind, as they saw it, from dull conformity to receive ideas and to see ideas and beliefs spread throughout and by the newly burgeoning mass media of television and news magazines.

Rather than a poetry defined by delicate indirection and elevated speech, the poets who came to be called the Beat poets wrote a poetry defined by shouting or repetition and colloquial speech, the speech of the everyday world, including obscene speech. They also incorporated, as Ferlinghetti does in “Christ Climbed Down,” the kind of speech being broadcast on television and often devised by public relations and advertising firms on Madison Avenue. They took that kind of language, which could be used for satiric or sarcastic effect, and put it beside the language of the street, speech of anguish and violence, funny speech, or speech of spirit-crushing vacuity. Because polite society was seen as the source of misery and hypocrisy, poets like Ferlinghetti and the Beats used impolite speech and were unafraid of vulgarity or obscenity.

The words that came from television and the street and from daily, down-to-earth experience constituted not only a different language for poetry from the one poets were writing but also asserted a different content from the usual content of poetry after WorldWar II. It was a poetry that was concerned with immediate situations, with wars, with continuously generated fear of a Soviet and a Chinese menace, with militarism, with the daily experiences imposed and denied by the culture. It was a poetry immersed in sociology and mystical enlightenment. It attempted to give voice and expression to the alienated internal experience of the self, whether conforming or rebelling.

Decorum, keeping up appearances, reflecting an uncomplaining cheerfulness in demeanor and behavior were the ideals that shaped the rather homogenous American culture of the 1950s. Against this the Beat poets wrote their poetry. “Christ Climbed Down” contains within it the essential motifs of the Beat sensibility. It is written in the common language, not in what the Beats would consider the elite jargon that had characterized the poetry around them. Ferlinghetti introduced into the verbal landscape of the poem words like “candycanes,” “pink plastic,” “tinfoil,” “powderblue,” “cornball,” “two-tone Cadillacs,” “Sears Roebuck,” “parcel post,” “special delivery” (with its knowing pun on delivery, as in birth), “televised,” “went around passing himself off,” “Volkswagon,” “jinglebell heaven,” and “craziest.” These are all words that could be heard on radio and television or in popular songs or read in the newspapers and mass-circulation magazines. They had not been the words with which poets had been making poetry. The use of such words for Ferlinghetti, as well as conveying the actual subject of a poem, constituted the dramatic matter of the poem. Such defilement of poetry in “Christ Climbed Down” is occurring in a poem that has taken as its subject the defilement of Christmas by commercial interests. But to the poet, his use of language is not a defilement but a gesture towards restoring poetry to the broad mass of people and restoring social existence and relevance to poetry.

The subject of “Christ Climbed Down” is its social project: exposing the subversion of the spirit accomplished through the practice of consumption. The images used to represent that subject and express its conflict are common cultural images, images of various kinds of Christmas trees as garish negations of the cross, which is described as a bare tree. A bare tree is a fitting image for the dolorous death that the cross represents. But Christmas is not the story of Christ's death. It is the story of the God's birth. The trees and other cultural artifacts that Ferlinghetti assembles in the poem are not signs of birth but of death-in-life, of death—since they are rootless—masquerading as life—since they are so gaudily adorned. Consequently, Christ climbs down from the cross, the true tree, bare and dead, in protest against the false celebration of a misbegotten birth in search of a new birth story and the elements with which to construct that new birth story. He hopes to dismantle the corrupt imagery of consumerism and commercialism.

The main rhetorical strategy of “Christ Climbed Down” is repetition. It is a simple structural form that was popular among poets of the Beat generation. It links elements together in a long chain. Formally such a poem is closer to hypnotic incantation than carefully constructed metrical verse. The poem, rather than constructing speech, reproduces and pours forth common speech. Ferlinghetti's lines are held together by the linking repetition of “Christ climbed down / from His bare tree / this year / and ran away to where.” And then it is like a game to fill in the blanks. It allows an exercise in unfettered imagination, free to express itself as it will as long as it stays within the broadly drawn boundaries of the poem's subject. The lines themselves that follow in “Christ Climbed Down” are actually emphatic prose broken up to look like the verse of poetry. There is something naïvely democratic about this. The form of the poem proclaims that making poetry is a possibility open to everyone. It is not the musical skill of metrics or a Homeric capacity for metaphor and simile that makes a poet. It is only swinging with the beat, drawing on the common language, laying down image clusters, and having a connection with how we actually live that the poet wants to say something about. In a sense, a poem like “Christ Climbed Down” is a precursor to rap, except that some rap shows a verbal dexterity, felicity, and obscenity, as well as a rhyming ingenuity and metric complexity more challenging and complex than Ferlinghetti's rather gentle screed. But in the late 1950s, what seems tame now was, inside the culture of the time, unsettling.

Readers who are familiar only with “Christ Climbed Down,” as representative of Ferlinghetti's stance and diction as it is, are missing one of the essential qualities of Ferlinghetti's poetic voice. “Christ Climbed Down” is a hip and funny poem, a routine full of one-liners, gags drawn from the mass culture of its time. But what is just as characteristic of Ferlinghetti as his punning and social satire is his lyricism. This quality is evident in the poem in A Coney Island of the Mind that directly follows “Christ Climbed Down.” Although “The Long Street” also is full of social satire and cultural criticism, to “deserts of advertising men” and “brittle housewives / sheathed in nylon snobberies,” it also reveals the long breath of common speech broken up into small line segments in graceful, dancing turns decorated with rhyme and repetition: “The long street / which is the street of the world / passes around the world / filled with all the people of the world / not to mention all the voices / of all the people / that ever existed / Lovers and weepers / virgins and sleepers.”

The lyricism that is an essential quality of Ferlinghetti's rhythm is one of the characteristics that tempers, but does not diminish, his satiric social criticism. “Christ climbed down / from his bare Tree / this year / and ran away to where,” although repeated, is far from strident. The subtle slant rhyme (a slight rhyme that is not exact) of “bare,” “year,” and “where” along with the near baby talk creates a gentle and friendly environment for the put-down that the poem essentially is. Ferlinghetti's lyrical power also deepens the experience of his poetry because lyricism imitates a rhythm that transcends the rhythm of momentary experience and suggests something eternally ongoing.

Indeed, he has moved away from the passing delights of appetite to a timeless lament for its transience. Inside the context of that realization, the burden of spiritual responsibility revealed in “Christ Climbed Down” becomes more deeply meaningful than social critique and suggests the hidden dimension of what it entails to be alive, to be connected to the earth, not alienated from it by cultural constructs that deny both the transience and the immortality that shape veritable human consciousness.

Source: Neil Heims, Critical Essay on “Christ Climbed Down,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.

James A. Butler

In the following article, Butler presents a critical overview of A Coney Island of the Mind and argues that Ferlinghetti's poetry transcends the Beat movement.

The public first began to suspect Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a dirty old man in 1955, when he published through his own City Lights Press his poetic Pictures of the Gone World. This first volume identified Ferlinghetti with the “Beat Generation Poets”—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and others—none of whom a girl could comfortably bring home to meet the family. The public's dirty-old-man suspicions were heightened when Ferlinghetti was tried in a 1957 obscenity case for publishing Ginsberg's “Howl.” Finally, Ferlinghetti's fame for filthiness was assured by a 1965 Time article describing a “happening” at the American Students and Artists Center in Montparnasse: “Beat Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti intoned his latest work while a naked couple made love vertically in a burlap bag, black light playing on their shoulders.”

It is tempting to merely categorize Ferlinghetti as a bush-league sick poet of a sick poetic movement, but several factors make this poet worthy of consideration. His major work, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), is now in its twelfth printing and has sold 130,000 copies to rank near the top of contemporary poetic best-sellers. In addition, Coney Island was received as “highly readable and often very funny” by The New York Times and as having “something of the importance ‘The Waste Land’ had in 1922,” (Library Journal). Finally, if a man may be known by the company he keeps, it is significant that the 1965 Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds presented poetry readings by Russia's Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Stephen Spender, Ezra Pound, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

In the light of Ferlinghetti's popularity, it is necessary for the critic to determine whether the poet is a best-selling one because of his somewhat scandalous vocabulary and somewhat more scandalous activities, or whether there is intrinsic value in the poetry. The method of this paper is to first develop an evolving understanding of the poetic devices of Ferlinghetti by examining selected instances. The poet's philosophy of a “street poetry” will next be discussed to determine whether Ferlinghetti accomplishes his end. After the above considerations, an attempt will be made to reconcile the dirty old man and the poet.

The first Ferlinghetti poem to be analyzed is from Coney Island (No. 25):

Cast up
  the heart flops over
      gasping ‘Love’
 a foolish fish which tries to draw
  its breath from flesh of air
And no one there to hear its death
      among the sad bushes
  where the world rushes by
      in a blather of asphalt and delay

Perhaps the first thing that strikes the reader in the above poem by Ferlinghetti is the absence of traditional poetic devices: rhyme, meter, uniform left-hand margin. Ferlinghetti's free verse is, of course, indebted to such prosodic pioneers as Walt Whitman and especially William Carlos Williams:

IT IS MYSELF,
  not the poor beast lying there
   yelping with pain
that brings me to myself with a start—
  as at the explosion
of a bomb, a bomb that has laid
all the world waste,

“To a Dog Injured in the Street” (W. C. Williams)

In addition to being influenced by Williams' free verse, Ferlinghetti also shows in other poems that he has absorbed some of the visual effects of Williams; e.g., the line visually accentuating the meaning:

And the way the bell-hop runs downstairs:
 ta tuck a
   ta tuck a
     ta tuck a
       ta tuck a
         ta tuck a

(Paterson—W. C. Williams)

like
  a
   ball
     bounced
down steps

(Coney Island, No. 22)

But these influences on Ferlinghetti's prosody, although important, are not dominant; it is rather the “Projective Verse” of Charles Olson that has not only influenced Ferlinghetti, but has become the new poetics of the new poetry.

Charles Olson's “Projective Verse” first appeared in Poetry New York of November 3, 1950. Summary of this complex essay is difficult, but basically Olson says that “form is never more than an extension of content.” The syllable, not the foot or meter, is the building block of poetry. The syllables thus do not combine into a foot, but into a line. The length of this line comes only from “the breathing of the man who writes at the moment he writes.” Meter and rhyme are therefore unimportant in the line length; the line is determined by those places in which the poet takes, and wants the reader to take, a breath. Ferlinghetti has much the same philosophy of sound:

The printing press has made poetry so silent
    that we've
forgotten the power of poetry as oral mes-
    sages. The
sound of the streetsinger and the Salvation
    Army speaker
is not to be scorned …

The application of the “projective verse” theory is evident in the first poem selected for analysis. The breathing stops arc so placed as to emphasize various lines. The first line, for example, “Cast up,” receives very strong stress from the breath taken both before and after. Other short lines also receive stress through breathing: “gasping ‘Love’,” and “among the sad bushes.” On the other hand, the longer lines pound quickly, partly because of the strong, regular, iambic rhythm and partly because of the harsh, spitting t's, b's, d's and f's:

a foolish fish which tries to draw
its breath from flesh of air

Throughout the poem, the line length and breathing are not used randomly as may first appear, but to accentuate the meaning.

Ferlinghetti does not, in spite of unconventional metrics, operate independently of poetic tradition. His entire poem is, of course, a metaphor comparing a fish out of water with a heart in love. The lines quoted immediately above represent a highly sophisticated use of metaphor: a heart in love that tries to exist from flesh is as helpless as a fish gasping for air. On the audio level, Ferlinghetti in this poem shows his competence at matching sound and meaning. One example of this skill is the explosive sounds (t's, b's, d's, and fs) used in the line above which through the explosion of sound, then unstressed syllable, then another explosion suggest breathlessness and gasping for air. “Gasping” in 1.3 is in itself onomatopoetic. The only true rhyme in the poem, the feminine rhyme of bushes and rushes, draws our attention to the pun on the meaning of rushes as plants. Finally, the last line plays with the a sound in a manner reminiscent of the slant rhymes of Yeats, Auden, Thomas, and Owen. The a's are all short vowels and move quickly to suggest the speed of which the poet speaks until the last, long a of “delay” slows the tempo:

in a blather of asphalt and delay.

We have seen in this poem how Ferlinghetti works with a modern prosody based on Whitman, Williams, and Olson. The poet is, in addition, a master of audio effects and in matching sound and meaning. Ferlinghetti also seems to delight in the pun by deliberately drawing attention to it. The following poem (Coney Island—No. 14) should reinforce those conclusions and add others:

Don't let that horse
    eat that violin
 cried Chagall's mother
      But he
   kept right on
      painting
And became famous
And kept on painting
 The Horse With Violin In Mouth
And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
      and rode away
    waving the violin
And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across
And there were no strings
      attached

Here Ferlinghetti is seen in a more playful vein than in the previous selection. The projective verse is again used for startling emphasis; e.g. “painting” in 1.6 and “attached” in 1.17. But the onomatopoetic use of syllable is not as prominent in this more humorous offering. The lines are kept quick-moving—in accordance with the light tone of the poem—by a majority of short vowels and short lines.

The reference by Ferlinghetti to something such as Chagall's “The Horse With Violin in Mouth” is typical of the poet. Much of Ferlinghetti's work is predicated on the reader's familiarity with culture, both past and present. In the twenty-nine short poems of Coney Island of the Mind, the poet refers, directly or indirectly, to Goya, Cervantes, Thoreau, Keats, T. S. Eliot, Hieronymous Bosch, Dante, Kafka, Longfellow, Stockton (“The Lady or the Tiger?”), Cellini, Picasso, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Proust, Lorca, Nichols (Abie's Irish Rose), Tolstoy, Freud, and Joyce. Sometimes the entire meaning of a Ferlinghetti poem is based on the reader's ability to recognize a famous line out of context, e.g., Keats' “silent upon a peak in Darien.” Obviously, this heavy reliance on cultural allusions somewhat limits Ferlinghetti's audience and will have major implications in regard to his “street poetry.”

Ferlinghetti has a strong sense of humor as is evident both in this poem and in several others, notably one which describes the secular excitement of the erecting of a Saint Francis statue, with all the reporters and workers and Italians, “while no birds sang.” In the Chagall poem, Ferlinghetti relies on the pun for humorous effect: “bow” meaning both a violin's bow and a bending of the body; “ran across” meaning both run under the horse's hooves and met in passing; and, “no strings attached” referring to the violin and to a gift. The linking of two synonymous words to create an enhanced meaning is also a favorite Ferlinghetti trick. In this poem, he uses “naked nude” for double emphasis; elsewhere he employs such figures as “sperm seed.” By such puns and double emphases, Ferlinghetti is clearly trying to combat American semiliteracy, where all read but few stop to understand. Another method this poet uses to stop the reader in his tracks and make him go back to think is the twisting of a familiar saying so that it sounds much the same but means far more. Of several dozen examples, representative effects of this kind include the following: drugged store cowboys; cinemad matrons; unroman senators; conscientious non-objectors; [Christ hanging on the cross] looking real Petered out; My country tears of thee; I hear America singing / in the yellow pages; televised Wise Men / praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey; [Santa Claus] bearing sacks of Humble Gifts from Saks Fifth Avenue.

This second poem thus clearly reveals two more characteristics of Ferlinghetti's work: 1) The poet is heavily dependent on cultural allusions; and, 2) the poet attempts his humorous effects through puns, double emphasis, and changed clichés.

The following poem will be the last considered before turning to an analysis of Ferlinghetti's “street poetry” and an overall evaluation of the poet.

 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 all without mistaking
    any thing
 for what it may not be
    For he's the super realist
      who must perforce perceive
     taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
 in his supposed advance
     toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
     with gravity
      to start her death-defying leap
 And he
    and a little charleychaplin man
     who may or may not catch
  her fair eternal form
      spreadeagled in the
empty air
 of existence

(Coney Island—No. 15)

Like many of Ferlinghetti's poems, this one shows an eye for the commonplace. Elsewhere he speaks of “The penny candy store beyond the El / … jelly beans … / and tootsie rolls / and Oh Boy Gum,” but here he compares a poet and a trapeze artist. Much of the skill of the poem is in this comparison as a detailed prose retelling should demonstrate. The poem begins with the statement that the poet, like the acrobat, risks absurdity and death “whenever he performs / above the heads / of his audience” (italics mine). The acrobat risks actual death because he is performing at a great height from the ground, while the poet risks literary death when he writes at a higher intellectual level than that to which his audience is accustomed. Like the acrobat, the poet climbs to the high wire to perform, but the poet climbs on rhyme. In his performance, the acrobat balances on steel I-beams, but also figuratively on the “eyebeams” of the spectators below. The poet also performs before eyebeams, the eyebeams of those reading his poems. Both the acrobat and poet do “sleight-of-foot tricks”: the acrobat walking the high wire and the poet dealing with another kind of foot—iambic, trochaic, etc. The “high theatrics” of the acrobat are literally high above the ground, but the poet's actions are figuratively “high theatrics.” Both the acrobat and the poet must, of necessity, perceive “taut truth” for if the acrobat's wire is not truly taut, he will fall; and if the poet does not see tightly-drawn truth, he will not succeed. This “taut truth” is necessary before the acrobat takes his “stance” (mode of standing) and before the poet takes his “stance” (intellectual or emotional attitude). The comparison continues with the acrobat waiting to catch his leaping female partner in that traditional trick of the high wire, while the poet tries to catch not a beautiful girl, but Beauty itself. Both the girl and Beauty jump and may or may not be caught by the acrobat and poet.

The mechanics of this poem again admirably enhance the meaning. The projective verse is used for heavy emphasis at crucial points (taut truth) and to visually and vocally correspond to the sense of the words:

where Beauty stands and waits
    with gravity
  to start her death-defying leap

In these lines, the spacing suggests a sudden drop and, in addition, the excitement of the last line is metrically shown by increased speed since it is a long line coming after a shorter one. Although the metaphors of the poem are all well made, perhaps the best is the picture of the poet trying to catch Beauty as “a little charley-chaplin man”. This metaphor conveys the perfect picture of a man—hands at his sides and a deadpan expression on his face—running helplessly in circles. In this poem, Ferlinghetti caught Beauty.

With some idea of Ferlinghetti's characteristics in mind, the philosophy of the poet will now be considered in order to determine whether he reaches his personally-set goals. This philosophy was quoted in Poetry of November, 1958:

I have been working toward a kind of street poetry … to get poetry out of the inner esthetic sanctum and out of the classroom into the street. The poet has been contemplating his navel too long, while the world walks by. The printing press has made poetry so silent that we've forgotten the power of poetry as oral messages. The sound of the street-singer and the Salvation Army speaker is not to be scorned …

In evaluating Ferlinghetti's success, or lack of it, with poetry for all, three characteristics of “street poetry” should be considered. First, poetry for all the people should be lively, rhythmic, and iterative. The advertising jingle would be an example of those traits, as would Vachel Lindsay's successful “popular poetry”:

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said:
   “He's come.”
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

Second, popular poetry should be narrative as in the ballad or in Lindsay's poem narrating General Booth entering heaven. Third, poetry for all should contain allusions familiar to nearly all.

Consideration of Ferlinghetti's poetry in regard to those three points shows definitely that his lines are not “street poetry.” In the first place, Ferlinghetti's poetry is mostly tuneless, arhythmic, and hard to remember. Without the printing press, the heavy beat, repetitiveness, and alliteration of Lindsay's lines would make them easy to remember. In contrast, the following lines by Ferlinghetti offer little aid to memorization and are hardly likely to be on the tip of everyone's tongue:

We squat upon the beach of love
 among Picasso mandolins struck full of
   sand
 and buried catspaws that know no sphinx
  and picnic papers
   dead crabs' claws
and starfish prints

(Coney Island—No. 24)

Secondly, few of Ferlinghetti's poems have a narrative content, as the representative poems selected for analysis show. In regard to the third requirement—familiar allusions—the twenty literary and artistic references mentioned above of this paper are allusions generally specialized to the more widely-read of the populace. Indeed, if an entire poem hangs on a line from Keats or a reference to Kafka, it is not a “street poem.”

There is one other trait sometimes found in popular poetry—the erotic—that leads to the consideration of Ferlinghetti as a dirty old man. As might be expected of a dirty old man, Ferlinghetti places prominently last in Coney Island a poem that maintains, in a style and vocabulary similar to the conclusion of Ulysses that all is sex and sex is all. Nevertheless, the reputation of Ferlinghetti as an erotic poet is exaggerated—only five of the twenty-nine poems of Coney Island have sexual themes. In spite of such description of himself as “the poet obscenely seeing,” Ferlinghetti's poems do not show as a dominant trait the ribaldness that to many seems to characterize his personal life.

Turning from the dirty old man to the poet, the poems selected for analysis show that there is great intrinsic value in Mr. Ferlinghetti's lines. The poem containing the dying fish—love metaphor, for example, demonstrates the poet's capabilities with a free verse inherited from Whitman, Williams, and Olson, in addition to a stunning use of metaphor and a skillful matching of sound and meaning. On the other hand, the Chagall poem shows Ferlinghetti's humor and punning both to be delightful, without becoming strained. In the acrobat-poet poem, Ferlinghetti creates a tour de force in metaphor.

Thus Ferlinghetti is both dirty old man and poet. But the poet is far too gifted to let himself be dominated or destroyed by the dirty old man. The time has come for Ferlinghetti to abandon his “beat” themes and his “beat” vocabulary: “square-type, cool, king-cat,” etc. A Coney Island of the Mind should be remembered as the early work of an excellent and universal poet and not as the best work of a “beat poet.” The poet once wrote:

I am a social climber
climbing downward
and the descent is difficult

The ascent into excellence is too near for Ferlinghetti to climb downward into that morass populated by dirty old men and “beat poets.”

Source: James A. Butler, “Ferlinghetti: Dirty Old Man?” in Renascence, Vol. 8, Spring 1996, pp. 115-23.

SOURCES

Butler, James A., “Ferlinghetti: Dirty Old Man?,” in Renascence, Vol. 8, Spring 1966, pp. 115-23.

Carruth, Hayden, “Four New Books,” in Poetry, November 1958, pp. 111-16.

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, “Christ Climbed Down,” in A Coney Island of the Mind, New Directions, 1958, pp. 69-70.

———, “The Long Street,” in A Coney Island of the Mind, New Directions, 1958, p. 71.

———, “Toward a New Lyricism,” in Exquisite Corpse, No. 8, 2001, http://www.corpse.org/issue_8/critiques/ferling.htm (accessed August 31, 2007).

Silesky, Barry, Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time, Warner Books, 1990, pp. 256-65.

Smith, Larry, Review of Pictures of the Gone World, in Small Press Review, Vol. 27, No. 9, September 1995, p. 12.

FURTHER READING

Allen, Donald M., The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, Grove Press, 1960.

This anthology was groundbreaking when first published, not just for introducing a new generation of poets but for showing the great change those poets had brought about in poetry with regard to form, subject, and language.

Goodman, Paul, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, Vintage Books, 1960.

A classic in its time, Growing Up Absurd is an analysis of the culture that Goodman argues is an unworthy environment for children. He believes that the shallowness of American culture has lead to several generational responses, which characterized juvenile delinquents, junior executives, and beatniks, each in a particular way.

Heims, Neil, Allen Ginsberg, Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.

In this biography of Ginsberg, Heims presents a picture of the social, cultural, literary, and intellectual milieu in which Ginsberg and his contemporaries (like Ferlinghetti) lived and worked.

Packard, Vance, The Hidden Persuaders, Ig Publishing, 2007, originally published 1957.

Packard's examination of the power of the advertising and public relations industries was a million-copy bestseller in the late 1950s.