American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919–2021
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1960s (Photo credit–Elsa Dorfman)
Ferlinghetti’s poetry provided a glimpse of the restlessness and rebelliousness of generations that emerged from and after the Second World War, who felt strongly the possibilities of global modern life and, at the same time, the terrible constrictedness of the dominant politics and culture in the Cold War era. His work often gave voice to the existing, but suppressed opposition to the established order of those years and sought to unmask, in poetic form, a portion of the actual social and political conditions.
Ferlinghetti was, so to speak, a “conscientious objector” in regard to the conformist and anticommunist American culture of the 1950s, and his early poetry collections such as