[In the following excerpt, Thompson notes the development of Pasolini from "civil poet" to "kinetic poet" in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poems]

As a poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini was an arch-traditionalist; as a man, a "politikon z on", he was a radical romantic whom disillusion drove to despair. The man frustrated the poet and forced him, first, to relinquish his traditional means in favour of a freer approach to poetry, and later, to abandon his poetry—ostensibly, at least—for the cinema.

The present volume of Poems, … represents about a sixth of Pasolini's published work in Italian and none of his early lyrics in the Friulan dialect. It is based on a selection Pasolini himself made for an edition in 1970, and includes his introduction to this volume as an appendix. Certainly, making a first, rigorous choice from among the works of such a wide-ranging poet is an exceedingly difficult task, and, while this selection is inclusive, showing the move from rational public poet to tortured private man, the picture it presents is inevitably incomplete….

What kind of a poet emerges? As may be expected of a writer who also painted, and later turned to film, a very visual one; the two long poems in terza rima are intense metaphysical meditations, but firmly located in time and place. A visit to the grave of Antonio Gramsci in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome is the setting for a scrupulously honest self-examination in the course of which the rational Communist finds that he does not want his beloved working class to change, to lose its traditional vital qualities; "Two days of fever" give rise to a scrutiny of his concepts of religion and love, where he remembers his earlier Catholicism, contrasting it with his present Marxism. In both poems, descriptions of his environment amplify and extend his state of mind. But, unlike the ermetici, Pasolini is not locked inside himself; the problems he examines, albeit from a personal, even private point of view, are universal: society, religion, social change. As most critics agree, Pasolini's great contribution was the creation of "una poesia civile", the rational argument of a civilized mind. But the adjective also carries the meaning of "civil": his is a public poetry, even if there is no consensus of acceptance by the public. After the strenuous effort to arrive at these well-reasoned, balanced poems of the 1950s, he changed direction, turning inwards to become a "kinetic poet": his subjective reactions are given first place, making for an engaging warmth, until they become the agony of his later years. However, in both modes, Pasolini was a skilled prosodist—especially in his resurrection of Dante's terza rima—who twisted and broke the rules to great effect….

Reviewing Pasolini's first small book of dialect poetry in the Corriere di Lugarno in 1943, Gianfranco Contini, then a young professor, hit a prophetic note in remarking on the "scandal" which it introduced into the "annals of dialect literature". The scandal was in trying to use dialect for the expression of honest, personal sentiment rather than as a medium for folk tales.