SOURCE: "Most Ancient of Youths," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4,253, October 5, 1984, p. 1130.

In the following excerpted review of Selected Poems, Wells notes that the strength of Pasolini's poetry derives from its openness and departure from hermetic lyric tradition.

"What strikes me is the realization of how ingenuous was the expansiveness with which I wrote them: it was as if I were writing for someone who could only love me a great deal. I understand now why I have been the object of so much suspicion and hatred".

The great strength of Pasolini's poetry is its openness, the desire "to have / the world before my eyes and not / just in my heart". Writing often in a loose terza rima which derives from Dante, he broke with the hermetic lyric tradition to produce a civil poetry (innovatory in Italian because it is of the Left), exploring in his own...