SOURCE: "'I Am a Free Man': Pasolini's Poetry in America," in Italian Quarterly, Vols. XXI-XXII, Nos. 82-83, Fall-Winter, 1980-81, pp. 99-105.

In the following excerpt, MacAfee focuses on the appropriateness of Pasolini's civil poems to a post-fascist society.

Pasolini's Italian poems were made as civil poems, in bright contrast to the then still dominant mode of poetic discourse, hermeticism—whose style was, I think, a function of its poets living under the growth and success of fascism. Pasolini's Italian poems, from 1954 to his death, are discourse appropriate to a post-fascist society, and fully use a climate of freer speech. Pasolini's long civil poems link him to Whitman and Pound and Ginsberg, but he is a real original—and just as the films of this film-poet have had roughest going in America, of all the non-Communist world, the poems will also upset some ideas about what a poem can't...