Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Oct. 8, 1988. Ferlinghetti died on Monday, Feb. 22, 2021 at the age of 101. (AP Photo/Frankie Ziths)
“The world is a beautiful place/ to be born into/ if you don’t mind happiness/ not always being/ so very much fun/ if you don’t mind a touch of hell/ now and then/ just when everything is fine/ because even in heaven/ they don’t sing/ all the time.”
So wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti in “The world is a beautiful place,” from his 1958 poetry collection
A Coney Island of the Mind, one of many well-known poems to come from the pen of this towering figure in American letters over his long lifetime.