SOURCE: "Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Painter's Eye," in Nine Essays in Modern Literature, edited by Donald E. Stanford, Louisiana State University Press, 196 5, pp. 107-16.

In the following essay, Corrington compares the structure of Ferlinghetti's poems to the style of several modern painters.

With the gradual ebb of publicity concerning "The Beat Generation," it has become possible, in the last year or so, to read the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti as literature rather than as a portion of an attenuated and faintly ludicrous social documentary. The "Beat" tag, so long an active element, arousing a surprising degree of partisanship among otherwise astute readers, has lapsed at last into the same kind of literary irrelevance as have such relatively meaningless terms as "The Auden Circle" and "The Imagistes." Having survived the onslaughts of Life and the Saturday Review, the praise of Kenneth Rexroth and the blame of J. Donald Adams...