SOURCE: "Poet into man," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4,149, October 8, 1982,p. 1105.

In the following excerpt, Thompson notes the development of Pasolini from "civil poet" to "kinetic poet" in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poems

As a poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini was an arch-traditionalist; as a man, a "politikon z on", 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, … 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...