Lawrence Ferlinghetti: An American Poet :: essays research papers fc

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet best know as a leader of the beat dejection of the 1950s. The beats were writers who condemned commercialism and middle-class American values. Ferlinghetti writes in colloquial discharge verse. His poetry describes the need to release literature and life from conformity and timidity. He believes drugs, Zen Buddhism, and emotional and physical love can open the mind to truth and beauty.Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. After using up his early childhood in France, he received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. from capital of South Carolina University, and a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. During World War II he served in the US Naval Reserve and was sent to Nagasaki shortly after it was bombed. He get hitched with in 1951 and has one daughter and one son. In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin began to exhaust City Lights magazine. They in like manner opened the City Lights Books Shop in San F rancisco to inspection and repair support the magazine. In 1955, they launched City Light Publishing, a book-publishing venture. City Lights became known as the heart of the "Beat" movement, which included writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and turd Kerouac. Ferlinghetti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry. He has translated the work of a physical body of poets including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ferlinghetti is also the author of two novels and of more than eight plays. In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in his honor. He was also named the first Poet honorable of San Francisco in 1998. In 2000, he received the lifetime achievement deed over from the National Book Critics Circle. Currently, Ferlinghetti writes a weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He also continues to operate the City Lights bookstore, and he travels frequently to participate in literary conferences and poetry readin gs.Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes in free verse, a style of poetry that does non follow traditional rules of poetry composition. In writing free verse, poets subjugate such usual elements as regular meter or hoar. Instead, they vary the lengths of lines, work irregular numbers of syllables in lines, and employ odd breaks at the end of each line. They also use irregular accents and rhythms and uneven rhyme schemes. But free verse is not free from all form. It does use such basic poetic techniques as alliteration and repetition.