Longing For HER: Ferlinghetti’s Mad Quest for the Muse
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document in English
humanities/philosophy
school essay
published 04/11/2007
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Summary
While Lawrence Ferlinghetti makes no claim to being enlightened, his poetry is nonetheless a record of and reaction to the sacred journey. While it is illuminating to read words of the awakened prophets of world history, I think it can be as rewarding to read the work of those who, sincere in their intention, still have some way to make along the path. In the pages of HER (1960), his poetic “labyrinth-dream,” Ferlinghetti takes the reader on a tour of “a semi-mad period of my life, in that mindless, timeless state most romantics pass through, confusing flesh madonnas with spiritual ones. ” In his search for bemusement, Ferlinghetti’s character travels through the realms of memory, meditation and song that characterize the three-fold Greek idea of the Muse. For Ferlinghetti, these three stages become recollection, obsession, and painting in an attempt to propitiate his nameless, maddening muse. In the process, the poet contributes to the discussion about the relationship between the woman-in-time and the timeless-goddess.
Table of Contents
- In his grammar of poetic myth, The White Goddess, Robert Graves discerns the 'single poetic theme' to be the Belle Dame Sans Merci¬.
- Further flouting his attempts at pinning down ‘her' image, his memory taunts him with a constant modulation of body parts and characteristics.
- Ferlinghetti reflects on the path to the true self, telling us that the first thing God made was love though the second thing he made was blood,'the third hip thing God made was [this] long journey
- But of course the devoted, wandering eyes of the poet never settle on one instance of these divine eyes and continue to become 'caught by another pair of eyes' after another.
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