"The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem"
About this Quote
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, both poet and painter, delivers a wry verdict on how art reaches people: images win because they make fewer demands. He is not belittling poetry so much as diagnosing a habit of attention. A painting offers immediacy; the eye grasps form, color, and mood in a glance. A poem asks for time, literacy, and a willingness to enter a sequence of lines that unfold meaning through rhythm, ambiguity, and silence. The remark carries a populist impulse at the heart of Ferlinghetti’s work: if you want to speak to the widest public, go where attention already flows.
The context is mid-20th-century America, with television, advertising, and headlines accelerating a culture of quick takes. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books sought to pull poetry out of the academy and into the street, pocket-size, inexpensive, performable. His own poems in A Coney Island of the Mind are cinematic and bright with imagery, built for the ear and the eye. As a painter, he also trusted the democratic power of visual art: murals, posters, and canvases are legible at a distance, even to those not trained in literary codes.
Calling people lazy is a provocation and a practical insight. Human cognition favors the visual; brains parse images with astonishing speed. But the line also smuggles in a challenge. If paintings communicate with ease, what is lost when effort disappears? Poetry’s slowness can be a form of resistance, a defense of depth against the flattening rush of mass media. Ferlinghetti’s solution was not to abandon words but to make them behave with visual energy: bold, accessible, and yet layered enough to reward close reading.
The claim still stings in an image-saturated era. It nudges artists to consider medium and audience, and it nudges audiences to own their habits of attention. Ferlinghetti stands at the hinge, translating between eye and ear, seeking a language that can be both instantly grasped and lastingly felt.
The context is mid-20th-century America, with television, advertising, and headlines accelerating a culture of quick takes. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books sought to pull poetry out of the academy and into the street, pocket-size, inexpensive, performable. His own poems in A Coney Island of the Mind are cinematic and bright with imagery, built for the ear and the eye. As a painter, he also trusted the democratic power of visual art: murals, posters, and canvases are legible at a distance, even to those not trained in literary codes.
Calling people lazy is a provocation and a practical insight. Human cognition favors the visual; brains parse images with astonishing speed. But the line also smuggles in a challenge. If paintings communicate with ease, what is lost when effort disappears? Poetry’s slowness can be a form of resistance, a defense of depth against the flattening rush of mass media. Ferlinghetti’s solution was not to abandon words but to make them behave with visual energy: bold, accessible, and yet layered enough to reward close reading.
The claim still stings in an image-saturated era. It nudges artists to consider medium and audience, and it nudges audiences to own their habits of attention. Ferlinghetti stands at the hinge, translating between eye and ear, seeking a language that can be both instantly grasped and lastingly felt.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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