SOURCE: "Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poetry as a Compensation," in Film Society Review, Vol. 4, No. 5, January, 1969, pp. 12-18.

In the following essay, Bragin discusses examples of Pasolini's work in the genres of the novel, film, and poetry.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna in 1922. His father was a government official and Pasolini travelled constantly as a boy, mastering many of the Northern Italian dialects. He attended the University of Bologna until the war forced him to flee to his mother's home in Casarsa, where he remained until 1949, writing his first fiction. In 1949 he moved to Rome, where he taught literature. Because of his poor financial status he was forced to live in the borgata, slum suburbs, which became the major source of subject matter for his writings and films.

Since that time he has continued writing both poetry and prose, as well as literary criticism and linguistic analysis...