FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence Pictures of the Gone World San Francisco: City Lights Books. 1955.
Small 4to. Black and yellow front and back card wrappers with stapled binding; yellow endpapers; unpaginated; rubbing to top and bottom of spine; otherwise very good.
Tenth printing.
“Every great poem fulfills a longing and puts life back together,” wrote Ferlinghetti after being awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal in 2003.
Pictures of the Gone World was the first volume in Ferlinghetti's classic City Lights Pocket Poets Series which famously championed a generation of voices from provocative young writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Malcolm Lowry. In 1956, Ferlenghetti was responsible for the publication of Allen Ginsberg's iconic poem, "Howl" which led to him being arrested for accusations of printing "indecent writings". He was acquitted and subsequently the poem became one of the most controversial and better known poems of the 20th century but Ferlinghetti was also a subversive writer in his own right.
Despite his intimate affiliation with the Beat poets, he rejected this more obvious label and instead considered himself to be the "last of the bohemians". Throughout his career, Ferlinghetti was persistent in his political agitation and challenging of the status quo, believing that art should be universally accessible rather than reserved for the privilege of academia. His poetry, and his Pocket Poet Series, sought to enable this insurgence and his personal, experimental work continually defies conservative political movements. In Western American Literature, John Trimbur noted that Ferlinghetti writes a “public poetry to challenge the guardians of the political and social status quo for the souls of his fellow citizens".
He died in 2021, at the age of 101. In his obituary, The New York Times christened him "the spiritual godfather" of the Beat Generation.
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