SOURCE: "Poet into Man," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4149, October 8, 1982, p. 1105.

In the following review, Thompson discusses Pasolini's Poems and Enzo Siciliano's biography of the poet and filmmaker.

As a poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini was an arch-traditionalist; as a man, a "politikon zoon", he was a radical romantic whom disillusion drove to despair. The man frustrated the poet and forced him, first, to relinquish his traditional means in favour of a freer approach to poetry, and later, to abandon his poetry—ostensibly, at least—for the cinema.

The present volume of Poems, as the translators state, represents about a sixth of Pasolini's published work in Italian and none of his early lyrics in the Friulan dialect. It is based on a selection Pasolini himself made for an edition in 1970, and includes his introduction to this volume as an appendix. Certainly, making a first, rigorous choice from among the...