Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Ferlinghetti, Lawrence (Vol. 111) - Michael Leddy (review date Autumn 1989)

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Michael Leddy (review date Autumn 1989)

SOURCE: A review of Wild Dreams of a New Beginning, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn 1989, pp. 683-84.

[In the following review, Leddy criticizes the poetry collection Wild Dreams of a New Beginning for being derivative and unimaginative.]

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning reprints the volumes Who Are We Now? (1976) and Landscapes of Living & Dying (1979). Ferlinghetti's concerns in the poems are as timely now as then. "This must be the end of something / the last days of somebody's empire," he writes in "Director of Alienation," and the poems deal largely with cultural, ecological, and political apocalypse. An occasional piece works well to convey these concerns—e.g., "Seascape with Sun & Eagle" or "Reading Apollinaire by the Rogue River." Typically, though, the poems are a matter of predictable mannerisms: parallelism and repetition,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. John William Corrington (essay date 1965)
   2. James A. Butler (review date Spring 1966)
   3. Alex Raksin (review date 4 September 1988)
   4. Patrick Burnson (review date Fall 1988)
   5. Michael Leddy (review date Autumn 1989)
   6. Gregory Stephenson (essay date 1990)
   7. Tony Curtis (interview date Summer 1992)
   8. Larry Smith (review date September 1995)
4. Further Readings
5. Copyright