Rarely has any poet's work received such wide popular acceptance and such limited critical appreciation as Lawrence Ferlinghetti's writing. While the public generally views the work as immediate, alive, and relevant, the academic and poet-critic generally attack it as being simplistic, sentimental, undisciplined, and in open violation of the conventional poetic form. Some critics, caught in the quandary of how to respond to the radically new values of this engaged poetry, have sought to detract from the writing by naïvely branding the poet as "one of those spiritual panhandlers" or "an egoistic trifler." Others such as Crale D. Hopkins and Vincent McHugh, who are more in tune with Ferlinghetti's methods and intent, respectively view the writing as "striking, powerful, convincing," and Ferlinghetti as "an original and a natural. A rare conjunction and in light of his astonishing gifts, correspondingly valuable."… Revolutionary in its form as well as its content, Ferlinghetti's writing is a deliberate and open challenge to the status quo of both art and life. As Hopkins points out, it is clearly based on a new definition of the very concept of "poetry." Apocalyptic in its conception, opposed to any traditional veneration of art, it is dedicated to no less than a radically new affirmation of the world and the word. Until we accept the genuine challenge of this poetry and deal with it earnestly and fully, we perpetuate the gap between experimental art and its critical appreciation. We labor in the dark. The existing art forms must bear the attack of experimentation if they are to remain vital. For Ferlinghetti they are clearly humanities which have failed to humanize us, and they are crying for reform. His art is most truly defined then by the protean forms which he has created to fulfill his revolutionary vision. (pp. 75-76)

[Ferlinghetti's] work is generated from the tension between things as they are and as they might become, the basic existential and romantic thrust of the work. He is both the realist and the idealist seeking to engage and regenerate life in his audience. Just as surrealist, expressionist, and naturalist painters have chosen to sacrifice certain "painterly" qualities for the immediacy of their art (the subject to artist to audience bond), so Ferlinghetti's engaged poetry sacrifices certain "poetic" qualities for its direct impact—its movement toward heightened consciousness that leads to action. Yet, while certain conventional poetic values are sacrificed …, not all are abandoned. Rather, they are recast with a more essential and deliberate molding of form to meet the goals of his vision. In fact, what emerges in Ferlighetti's poetry is a more immediate rhetoric of form and function based on both its transparent values of essential action and its inner logic of emotion and thought. He thus develops methods to fulfill his integrated and tripartite vision of an art which is characterized as: 1) authentic—existentially true to the artist's candid sense of life; 2) engaged—grounded in broad and common human experience yet directed towards active transformation; 3) visionary in its pursuit of wonder—the positive potential of human existence…. More than any other contemporary poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes truly memorable poetry, poems that lodge themselves in the consciousness of the reader and generate awareness and change. And his writing sings, with the sad and comic music of the streets. (pp. 76-7)

Three of the chief characteristics of Ferlinghetti's poetry—its oral basis, its satiric intent, its development of the authentic voice—are integrally bound. "The breath, response, the personal rhythm of Ferlinghetti's line—the immediacy, the directness of his style as he turns to tell you something. I don't think anyone else has the tone of Ferlinghetti—the flat, dry, laconic and compelling tone-sound of his voice." Samuel Charters locates here the distinctive feature and the united effect of a Ferlinghetti poem in its personal, immediate, and expressive voice. Ferlinghetti creates a contemporary basis for the tradition of the Homeric, Celtic, and Druid minstrels. He becomes the contemporary man of the streets speaking out the truths of common experience, often to the reflective beat of the jazz musician. As much as any poet today he has sought to make poetry and engaging oral art…. (p. 77)

Surveying the gamut of Ferlinghetti's poetry convinces one of his visionary and engaged quest for the authentic. He is the public and personal poet of American consciousness whose work knows no boundaries of nationality or genre. His influences are internationally varied, yet they are directed through his personal dedication toward a common and vital art…. Whether it is in oral, satirical, open, abstract expressionist, surrealistic, filmic, or prose poem form, it is an authentic evolution of life and art reaching into each other. The development of his poetry through his various books and recordings thus provides a revealing summary of his poetic achievement.

Pictures of the Gone World (1955), both derivative and experimental, breaks new ground for what poetry could be while it also begins to build a Ferlinghetti style. Its self-declarative theme and form lay out the groundwork for Ferlinghetti as a writer. The "gone world" theme, a jazzman's analogy to Camus's "Absurd," lies before him, and he is in it and with it. It is reflected in his cultural mirrors, enlarged by his ready allusions, and sharply focused in the poem "26" declaration where he decidedly turns from thoughts of Yeats's Arcady to "all the gone faces / getting off at midtown places." His is to be an art deliberately engaged in life. For precedents in theme and form he has Americans E. E. Cummings and Kenneth Patchen, but more pronounced is the influence of Frenchmen Jacques Prévert, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars. He develops his own open-form, abstract expressionist mode while also reaching into speech forms for diction and style. Though some poems go flat from a too prosey form (either from ineptness, experimentation, or engaged stance), the work is an original and solid foundation for his later developments.

His translations of Paroles (1958), which he had been working on for some time, show Ferlinghetti as the perfect translator of Jacques Prévert. His coming to himself as poet, through Prévert, is revealed in their shared themes and forms (street and oral, slangy and surreal, with tones of the murder as well as the joy of life); the work is full of wit and love and caring…. (pp. 136-37)

When selections from Pictures of the Gone World were combined with the poetry-and-jazz experiments "Oral Messages" and the original poems of A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), Ferlinghetti had enlarged his stance and developed major themes of anarchy, mass corruption, engagement, and a belief in the surreality and the wonder of life. It was a revolutionary art of dissent and contemporary application which jointly drew a lyric poetry into new realms of social-and self-expression. It sparkles, sings, goes flat, and generates anger or love out of that flatness as it follows a basic motive of getting down to reality and making of it what we can. The book is a consolidation of themes and methods which brings together the surrealist images of the "Coney Island" poems, the abstract expressionism of the painting analogies (rendered in human effects), the oral style and cultural mirrors of the "Oral Messages," the American sense of Imagism with a Joycean symbolism of subject and form. Loosely, the book forms a type of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Poet of Dissent." There are some classic contemporary statements in this Ferlinghetti's—and possibly America's—most popular book of modern poetry. The work is remarkable for its skill, depth, and daring. (pp. 137-38)

Ferlinghetti's 1961 Starting from San Francisco followed Walt Whitman's lead in journeying outward as a means of expanding yet solidifying a stance. The personal and social involvements are broadened in these bold and bare poems directed toward a new engaged art for a new world…. The poems are direct in their content and in their violation of conventional form. An oral style predominates, often manifested in the deeply ironic voice and in his own heartfelt mixture of radicalism and innocence. The book was first issued with a recording of the poet reading key poems, and the book does contain some important statement poems … and some developments of the analogical method and the prose poem applied to engaged poetics. "Berlin" and "Situation in the West" were added later, rounding the collection to sixteen long poem confrontations which compose themselves in Ferlinghetti's evolving recognition of the evil and death in life.

The Secret Meaning of Things (1968) followed Ferlinghetti's period of experimental drama in the mid-sixties and reflects his stronger attention to irrational and intuitive analogy as a means of suggesting the "secret meaning" behind life's surface. Though the works are provocative, public, and oral, they are also more cosmic in reference, revealing a stronger influence from Buddhist philosophy. Despite the fact that the book appeared during the height of the Vietnam War, the writing is more in touch with life forces, mellowed by his attempt to be at one with his various feelings and places. The vision is both dark and hopeful in such apocalyptic statements as "Assassination Raga," "After the Cries of the Birds," "Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow." These six long poems continue the journey of Starting from San Francisco toward a deeper and clearer understanding in which the poet sees and records "All Too Clearly" the slow eternal progress of civilization.

Open Eye, Open Heart (1973) is Ferlinghetti's largest and most complete collection with material ranging from 1961 to 1973 included under four broad headings: "Open Eye, Open Heart," poems of self and tributes to Patchen, Lawrence, Whitman; "Poems in Transit," journey observations from around the world, including the impressionistic rendering of "Russian Winter Journal" and the surrealistic "Trois Poèmes Spontanés,"; "Public & Political Poems," various dated affirmations and tirades of his basic humanitarian socialist stance applied to new situations—Vietnam, Greece, Spain, and the poor; "American Mantra & Song," American English chants of extreme open statement and lyric form. It is a big book with memorable poems reminiscent of A Coney Island of the Mind, but with a richer feeling and form and a finer, more matured voice. Like his cosmic journey toward understanding, this work contains diversity yet wholeness, held together by a composite of approaches and forms, attitudes and visions—the tried character of his life and its oneness with his art.

Ferlinghetti delineates the territory of his last three books of poetry in his open praise of the conscious and subconscious mind as "Maxims and legends of total reality, echoing and reechoing there,… Visual beatitudes, landscapes of living and dying flashed upon the dark screen."… Who Are We Now? (1976) is a vision of the times translated into image-idea in a mythic earth-self quest. Though the collection is a little uneven, it contains the characteristic mixture of prose poems, tributes, filmic scenes, general views of life, art, politics, and society, and a return to three painting-poems for Gustav Klimt and Monet. It is, however, dominated by the momentous "Populist Manifesto," which contains all the best of Ferlinghetti—his particular angle of vision amidst a stark and dark reality, and all the care and calculation of his oral and rhetorical style. The poem is an explicit and artful delineation of the new essential poetry, a statement and demonstration of his engaged and authentic art.

Northwest Ecolog (1978) takes this urban poet into the wilderness where he is equally at home with earth-life concerns and able to meditate on life and age. It is a fine, mellow book full of quiet beauty and concern using imagist and open-form composition. Nature and consciousness come together in an epiphanous stillness in which the acts of perception and apperception unite. The journal prose and the original sumi drawings reinforce the transparent yet profound approach rendering the book as pure as a stream amidst the ecological destruction of encroaching civilization. The book has a rare wholeness of effect as autobiographical detail achieves universality through the meditative form brought on by a comprehensive consciousness of the ultimate limits of earth and life.

Following his populist directive, Ferlinghetti has published many of the poems in Landscapes of Living and Dying (1979) in newspapers. It too is a more mellowed, aged book, yet alive in its awareness of the times. The mythic reality of life is captured in various forms—the oral street observations of "The Old Italians Dying," the satiric tirade of "Home Home Home," the prose poem tributes of "Look Homeward, Jack," the deep synthesis of political awareness and surrealist image in "White on White," and the many mass culture filmic scenes. Possibly the strongest poem in terms of statement and form is his second populist manifesto, "Adieu A Charlot." Here Ferlinghetti strips away life's false myths (social and artistic) to arrive at the personal and universal myths that have been earned through the authentic. His characteristic engaged voice is heard loud and clear above the din of contemporary poetry and poetics. Through his vision, his ever-widening involvements, and his authentic search, he finds the essential stance and thus molds the creative forms to make him America's most public and personal poet. All of this is borne out in his recent journal poems published as A Trip to Italy and France (1980) and by his self-selected Endless Life: Selected Poems (1981), which is expanded by a third populist manifesto, "Modern Poetry Is Prose (But It Is Saying Plenty)" and by inclusion of a segment from his long work-in-progress, "Endless Life." Ferlinghetti is still very much at large, with us and of us, as he tells us in "Endless Life," "For there is no end to the hopeful choices / still to be chosen … And there is no end / to the doors of perception still to be opened." (pp. 139-42)