Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Ferlinghetti: Rebirth of Wonder "Don't call me a Beat. I was never a Beat poet." Ferlinghetti actually penned much of his early poetry in the vein of T. S. Eliot. Ferlinghetti told poet and critic Jack Foley "Everything I wrote sounded just like him." Yet, even in his poems inspired by Eliot such as Ferlinghetti's "Constantly Risking Absurdity," Ferlinghetti is ever the populist as he compares the poet first to a trapeze artist in a circus and then to a "little charleychaplin man." Critics note that Ferlinghetti's poetry often takes on a very visual dimension as befits this poet who
T. S. Eliot to a lunatic asylum, against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947. Their relationship became the subject of a 1984 play "Tom & Viv", which in 1994 was adapted as a film of the same name. In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in