Pictures of the Gone World (Pocket Poets Series Number One) [Paperback]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1955 | Series: Pocket Poets Series Number One

Published to celebrate forty years of City Lights publishing, which began with the letterpress printing of this book in 1955.

It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book, and it has been reprinted twenty-one times, having never been out of print. The original edition contained the first twenty-seven poems to which the author has now added eighteen new verses.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 32 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Books (January 1955)
• ISBN-10: 087286040X
• ISBN-13: 978-0872860407
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,044,603 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars refreshingly fresh and innocent and playful and insightful, January 29, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) (Paperback)

This has to be my favorite volume of poetry to date (yet I am still young and have much to read). I found it "refreshing" and "light" if you will, yet at the same time
taking on some real insight. My favorite poems in the volume include "Heaven"; which I take as almost a poetic criticism OF poetry, and "London"; which takes on issues of physical beauty. All the poems in here I enjoy immensely. Well worth your small investment. (Plus it has historic value being the first in the legendary Pocket Poets
Series.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Word snap-shots of life, July 4, 2003

By 

OAKSHAMAN "oakshaman" (Algoma, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) (Paperback)

I am embarassed to say that I picked this book up on my last visit to City Lights (several years ago) but I never actually read it. Other than for a piece or two in an anthology, I had never read Ferlinghetti, period. Having enjoyed the hospitality of the upstairs poetry room, that seemed somehow ill-mannered of me.

Simply put, I liked this collection. The images and meanings are more subtle than a lot of poets with Beat roots. He can really paint a word picture to put you in the scene. You instantly soak up the nuances of the whole. Then maybe he'll nudge you, ever so slightly, into seeing the absurdity in it. Or perhaps he'll interject a reminder of your own mortality in a simular subtle way. It is appropriate that one of the poems deals with Edward Hopper. I get that Hopperesque quality of an observer in an existential urban landscape with much of the collection.

About the only difference that I detected from the first 27 poems (written by 1955) and the 18 new ones (new in 1995) is a difference in rhythm. The older poems have much more of that classic coffee house beat- at least in my head. Of yes, he also uses the term "cyberpunk" in one of them.... But the word painting, and sense of subtle absurdity, is still right on the money.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Pictures, March 9, 2007

By 

Carmen Valdez (Mexico City, MX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) (Paperback)

"Pictures of the Gone World" had not been so fully praised as Ferlinghetti's next book of poems, "A Coney Island of the Mind". The only reason I can come up with is the extensive use of surrealist imagery and references to other poets, painters, sculptors etc., that the poems are full with. But in "Coney Island" there is a similar creative procedure--even the line order is "floating", as in "Pictures", so why is this book less known than "Coney Island"? It is probably not a matter of quality; probably more people feel attracted to read a book about Coney Island than one with a title which at first sight doesn't seem to say too much about its content.

The poems incuded in "Pictures" are nevertheless great. This collection of verse is probably one of the most representative works during the Beat generation, along with Ginsberg's "Howl and other poems" (also published in City Lights Books) and Kerouac's "On the Road". Ferlinghetti succesfully intertwines surrealistic and dadaistic tendencies with oral speech, complex verbalization processes such as ekphrasis, which show the poet's skills at his best.

This second edition brings us 18 new poems, which every Beat fan must get. Some of these new poems are quite remarkable, such as "Surfers are poets too", and there are some "addenda" to the previous ones. For example, no. 6 includes a whole new stanza, and words in no. 1 have been changed. This 1995 edition is also a collector's item, for it was published to celebrate 40 years of City Lights publishing.