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 is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader." Julius's viewpoint has been supported by literary critics such as Harold Bloom, Christopher Ricks, George Steiner, Tom Paulin and James Fenton. In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, published under the title "After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy" (1934), Eliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence, "What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." Eliot never re-published this book/lecture.