Poems
Poem 5: 'The world is a beautiful place'
Extract
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
The Poet: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in New York in 1919 and studied journalism at the University of North Carolina before serving as a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Naval Reserve in the Second World War. After the war he studied in New York and Paris and became a leading member of the group of writers and artists (including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac) known as the 'Beat Generation'. Ferlinghetti established the legendary City Lights bookstore and publishing house in San Francisco in the early 1950s, and published the vigorous, experimental poetry of his fellow Beat writers, such as Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl!' and his own 'Pictures of the Gone World', which are both now classics of twentieth-century poetry.
Ferlinghetti believes that a poet should be an agitator whose message should reach ordinary people. The sheer energy of much of his poetry, and of other American poetry of his generation, broke out of polite conventions to celebrate love, sex and spiritual and political freedom in defiance of the conservatism of Cold War America.
The Poem
'The Beat movement' is a convenient label for a generation of writers, artists and musicians and their audiences, many of whom had served in the Second World War. They were frustrated by the small-minded conservative atmosphere of post-war America and by a society that asked them to conform to certain modes of dressing, thinking and living - the 'American Dream' - they had other ideas.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem 'The world is a beautiful place' is a confident, sprawling celebration of youthful energy in the face of what the Beats saw as the mistrustful paranoia of the most powerful government in the world - 'with its men of distinction / and its men of extinction / and its priests / and other patrolmen'. Set against 'a few dead minds / in the higher places' is the simple exuberance of 'smelling flowers / and goosing statues' or 'making babies and wearing pants'. It is not a naive poem. It recognises death - 'the smiling / mortician' - at the heart of it all, but in a profoundly un-Christian way suggests that we celebrate this imperfect world because it's all there is, it's all we've got.
The long rambling shape of the poem, its immediate conversational tone and forward-moving melodic lines, represented an inspirational departure from more formal styles of writing. The Beats looked for a form-busting spontaneity of expression; they found inspiration in Eastern religions, in the brilliant improvisations of jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and in the abstract expressionist painting of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
What Simon Armitage Said
'In America in the 1950s... there were all kinds of revolutions going on - particularly within the arts - new forms of expression, and beat poetry was very much a part of that. Suddenly it wasn't good enough to write sonnets, to write formal elegies... these were poems that didn't seem to know when to stop - didn't even seem to know when to start sometimes.
'The best poems from that era do have a kind of principle - it's a principle of thought, of expression and also a kind of melody as well... but it's not formal; it's not neat; it's not polite... it's a kind of poetry doing exactly what it wants.
'These were poems that were being recited in clubs late at night. You can almost see the cigarette smoke curling around that poem... and you can hear the saxophone in the background. There is a kind of jazz musicality to the poem - a sort of laid-back improvised thing going on.'
Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998
