Art & Creativity Quote by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti lands the insult with a grin: people are lazy, so give them something they can swallow in a glance. Coming from a poet who built City Lights into a temple of the paperback and the radical, the line isn’t a surrender to visual culture so much as a provocation aimed at poetry’s priesthood. If poems can’t compete with paintings for attention, maybe the problem isn’t the audience’s “laziness” alone; it’s the way poetry often demands reverence, training, and time - luxuries modern life withholds.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, he’s defending painting as a more efficient transmitter of feeling or idea. Underneath, he’s needling poets to stop confusing difficulty with depth. Ferlinghetti’s Beat-era project was accessibility with voltage: art that walks in off the street, not art that requires a graduate seminar and a cleared afternoon. Calling people lazy is a blunt instrument, but it’s also a democratic one. It refuses the comforting narrative that “the masses” just don’t get it; instead, it asks whether poets have made getting it unnecessarily hard.

Context matters: Ferlinghetti lived through the rise of mass media, advertising, television, and a culture increasingly trained to process images faster than sentences. He’s diagnosing an attention economy before the phrase existed. The subtext is a dare: if painting wins by speed, poetry has to win by urgency - by making language feel as immediate as color, as unavoidable as a billboard, without becoming one.