Wednesday, April 22, 2009
In "Goya's Greatest Scenes..." we seem to see...
“In Goya's Greatest Scenes We Seem to See” we take notice of Ferlinghetti's opinion of present human life. That present life is just as dark and marauding as Goya's painting suggest, only, in a different era. Ferlinghetti reveals his dislike of cars and their effect on the world, as they "devour America". "All the final hollering monsters of the 'imagination of disaster'... as if the y really still existed / and they do". The line "they are the same people / only further from home", suggests a feeling that Ferlinghetti hoped for a better life, or a better... situation. Stripped from the simplistic times we once had, full dependence on technology, living on a "concrete continent", bombarded with "empty" picture frames displaying assumed happiness, but epitomizing the general state...
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Consider too that Ferlinghetti establishes a parallel between the prisoners condemned to death in some of Goya’s works and the “living dead” addicted to drugs and a materialistic lifestyle in modern America.
ReplyDeleteThe both of you explains this poem to me in another and better view..its as if the poet is saying we are the monsters and carnivors eating up and destroying the good old country..he prefered the old ways when things werent too complicated and so advnced...
ReplyDeleteYes, very much an indictment of contemporary, and esp. pop, culture; you can find some of these woodcuts online--Goya's "Disasters of War" http://homepage.mac.com/dmhart/WarArt/StudyGuides/Goya.html -- scroll down till you see "Disasters of War," the scroll a bit farther for links to some of the prints), and the "Caprichos" (http://www.wesleyan.edu/dac/coll/grps/goya/goya_intro.html) are worth checking out. Viewing these will help foreground some of the poem's imagery. For other things to consider, see study sheets/exercises.
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