B Y L A W R E N C E F E R L I N G H E T T I
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence. In Goya’s Greatest Scenes we seem To See. In: HOOVER, Paul (Ed.). Postmodern American Poetry. A Norton Anthology. New York/London: W. W.Norton & Company, 1994. p. 43-44
The excerpt above is part of a poem by American painter and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In this poem, Ferlinghetti establishes intercourse with plastic arts, namely, paintings in which Goya depicts war. This entanglement pops up not only in the poem’s theme but also in its form, which translates to the violence and chaos experienced in war. Mark the alternative that better defines that kind of relationship between literature and other arts.
