COMPARISON OF POEMS FROM THE "BEATS" AND "NEW YORK" SCHOOLS.

I intend to compare two poems from the "Beats" and the "New York" schools. The poems that I will discuss are "Sometime

During Eternity" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the Beats and " Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" by Kenneth

Koch of the New York school. My first impression when reading these poems was that both of these poems share the

similarity of being rather comedic in nature. They appear to differ in the way that the verses are constructed.

The poem "Sometime During Eternity" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a poem that discusses the legacy and death of Jesus

Christ and casts doubt on the authenticity of the scrolls discovered in the Dead Sea in 1947. It displays the use of "cool" or

"hip" language and this is one of the first things that I noticed. I also noticed that the versification was rather different in its

layout from the structures that we have been dealing with in the class till this point. An example can be seen in an excerpt

from the poem:

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter

In the poem "Variantions on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" by Kenneth Koch, the antagonist is comically relaying to

the protagonist several devious things that he has done to her. The versification scheme in this poem is different from the

type I observed in the poem by Ferlinghetti. The number of lines per stanza alternated between four and three lines. An

example of the hilarity that I found in this poem that is similar to the comedic nature of the poem by Ferlinghetti can be

seen in the following excerpt:

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the ward, where I am the doctor.