| Subject: Can Poetry Change the World? From Lawrence Ferlinghetti |
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Date Posted: 09:03:57 02/06/01 Tue
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Can Poetry Really Change the World?
[San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1999]r
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
What is the use of poetry these days? Isn't it a romantic illusion to think that poetry can really
change anything? Isn't the poet really powerless in today's dog-eat-cat world of power-players,
power-plays, and super-powers?
Today in the United States, the poet has no real place or status. In Latin America and in some
European and Middle Eastern countries, poets are still honored in society, but in North America
what other city except San Francisco appoints a poet laureate every year? Even so, what power
has he or she in the "real" world? Even in the last century, when traditional values still held Western
civilization together, a great poet like Matthew Arnold could lament that a poet is nothing but "a
beautiful ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." (He was thinking of
Shelley.)
Still there are those, including myself, who believe in poets as the antennae of the race, as the
conscience of society, or at least as Jack Kerouac said, "the great rememberer redeeming life from
darkness." The greatest poets' greatest lines have entered mass consciousness, and they are great
precisely because they have continued to resonate in our lives today.
One thinks of "poems of first instance" (as the poet Mary Oliver called them), those first
experiences with poetry, usually encountered at an early age, that somehow affected one's whole
life. "In just the way that all first experiences," Oliver says, "making their way across the still-forming
landscapes of the mind, are likely to exist through an entire lifetime as the most important, most
emotive, most influential experience of their own kind--in just this way, poems of the first instance
are profound." ( Blue Pastures, p .94)
Walt Whitman was the poet that first turned her on. And then there was William Blake, Edgar Allan
Poe, Shelley and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Milton. And there was Keats:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness. . . .
And who's to say that so many lines of Shakespeare do not still resonate in us today, having
entered our daily speech, even though we're no longer even aware of their origins? So with
passages by Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold or W.B. Yeats or T.S.Eliot or others more recent.
But to go back to our beginnings. Did not Homer and the Greek dramatists articulate the
consciousness and the sensibility of the ancient Greeks, even as Ulysses' voyages defined the limits
of their world? And did not Dante in Italy, Cervantes in Spain, and Chaucer in England almost
simultaneously bring to consciousness a new world emerging from the Dark Ages? And do not the
first lines of Dante's Divine Comedy still speak to us in the deepest part of our lives?
In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood
Where the straight way was lost. . . .
And so too twentieth-century authors like James Joyce whose hero, Stephen Dedalus, on the last
page of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man sets out "to forge in the smithy of my soul the
uncreated conscience" of his race. Thus we arrive at the point at which the poet not only articulates
the consciousness of his time but also becomes its conscience, and we come full circle to the poet's
prophetic or vatic role, with contemporaries like Allen Ginsberg (who so many have attested
changed their consciousness) and Bob Dylan (whose early songs were great surrealist poems) and
the Beatles. Who's to say they did not change and enlarge the consciousness of millions of youth,
which was then ingested by consumer society to become a part of Middle American culture?
Thus we realize how the greatest poets not only change the way we see the world but also cause us
to question our perception and interpretation of everyday reality. And we realize that the greatest
poetry "subverts the dominant paradigm," ultimately challenges the status quo of the world, and
transforms it into something new and strange.
Which leads me to the unavoidable conclusion that the poet must perforce be an "enemy of the
state." I hasten to add, lest the FBI knock on my door in the morning, that I mean an enemy of the
state of our civilization today. Our omniverous industrial civilization has proved to be bad for earth
and man, ecologically and medically speaking. Disastrous, in fact. Couple this with the institution of
stringent restrictions on individual freedom to keep our imperialist military-industrial machine
functioning, and you have a natural enemy for the poet who is by definition a free spirit, an untamed
erotic spirit dedicated to truth and beauty.
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