“Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we,” Saul Bellow writes in Humboldt’s Gift, a novel about the contradiction of art and materialism.. Millenia ago, humans struggled with the same question: how much do we define our inventions as opposed to our inventions defining us? Daedalus, the hubristic inventor of Greek mythology, is one of the first prominent examples of this. Everywhere he turns, his overconfidence in his power as an inventor leads to death and destruction. As a global power built on materialism and resource-consumption, the United States has faced a similar dilemma. Invention and business have often threatened to push out pursuits of the soul and mind. The innately human challenge of our relationships with our creations has been a subject of profoundly critical and stinging poetry since the creation of civilization. In his famous collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind, twentieth century poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti speaks to the same dilemma that Ovid, the foundational poet of Ancient Rome, writes upon in his epic poem, Metamorphoses. They each play the role of the artist trying to explain the human fascination with our own creations.
Ovid, together with Virgil and Horace, was Ancient Rome’s answer to Homer. In his most famous work, Metamorphoses, Ovid chronicles a wide variety of transformations and “metamorphoses” in Greek mythology from the tale of Arachne and Athena to the story of Daphne and Apollo. With these segments from Greek mythology, Ovid captures human and divine struggles as well as the nature of change and transformation itself. In one of the best-known sections of Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Daedalus, the ingenious but flawed inventor of Greek mythology, and the death of his son Icarus. Daedalus and Icarus have been imprisoned by King Minos in Crete. To escape, Daedalus devises an intricate plan to build wings so that he and Icarus can fly to freedom. Icarus flies too close to the sun, and his wings melt. He falls down into the ocean and drowns. Though the tale has often been misinterpreted or purposefully retold to make the death of Icarus a warning against adolescent arrogance, in truth, it is a tale about the recklessness and hubris of a man obsessed with his own creations. Taking flight from their prison cell, Daedalus “urged the boy to follow, and showed him the dangerous art of flying, he moved his own wings, and then he looked back at the wings of his son.” The last part of this section is often mistranslated as “he looked back at his son” to try and make this action into a gesture of affection and concern. However, the original Latin tells us that Daedalus “looked back at the wings of his son.” He was not concerned with the safety of his son, likely still a small child. Instead, he was looking back to see how his invention was working. Daedalus was so obsessed with his own genius, so absorbed with his inventions, that he put his son in grave danger.
After Icarus flies too close to the Sun and falls into the sea, Ovid describes a very touching scene of remorse and regret. “The unhappy father, now no longer a father, said ‘Icarus,’ ‘Icarus,’ he said, “where are you? In which region should I be looking for you?’ ‘Icarus’ he was saying. He caught sight of the feathers in the waves and cursed his arts.” The emotional scene that Ovid describes in this passage is not of a father regretting the arrogance of his son, but it is the scene of a father regretting his own arrogance. He “[curses] his arts” because they are what caused the death of his son. He put his infant son in a very precarious and dangerous situation because of his own hubris and overconfidence in his inventions. He realizes that his inventions are what led to the death of his son.
Thousands of years later, writing about the great empire of his day, the poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti published A Coney Island of the Mind, one of the most famous poetry anthologies of the twentieth century. In a radical new style, Ferlinghetti’s anthology touches upon the most pressing issues of his day from nuclear arms to poverty. Two of the most famous poems from this collection are the first and fourth ones known by their first lines: “In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see” and “In a surrealist year.” “In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see” uses the metaphor of the paintings of Goya, the great Spanish surrealist artist, to illuminate the suffering and absurdity of American materialism. Writing of Goya’s characters, Ferlinghetti expounds:
“they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
And they do
Only the landscape is changed
They still are ranged along the roads
plagued by legionnaires
false windmills and demented roosters
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more strung-out citizens
in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America
Ferlinghetti writes like Ovid of the perils of humanity’s obsession with its own creations. The“freeways fifty lanes wide” and “strange license plates” are like Daedalus’ wings. America as a nation, Ferlinghetti argues, has become far too engrossed in our own materialistic endeavors. In his imagery, the reader senses a Gothic touch, a technological utopia devoid of feeling and filled with suffering. The hubris of Daedalus is his obsession with his own technological genius, but the hubris of America is its obsession with the mass produced products of its assembly lines.
“In a surrealist year” paints a similar picture of America’s craving for nuclear weapons and military superiority. Ferlinghetti mocks this element of American society, comparing it to a circus and describing a dystopian year of actualized nuclear warfare. Imagining the aftermath of such a deadly conflict, he writes:
O it was a spring
of fur leaves and cobalt flowers
when cadillacs fell thru the trees like rain
drowning the meadows with madness
while out of every imitation cloud
dropped myriad wingless crowds
of nutless nagasaki survivors
And lost teacups
full of our ashes
floated by
In this passage, Ferlinghetti is describing the dramatic consequences of American nuclear obsession. Even more so than in Ovid’s depiction of the death of Icarus, the hubris portrayed in Ferlinghetti’s dystopia has a horrific and dramatic result. Instead of these machines bringing us fulfillment or satisfying some primevil craving, they conclude only in absolute destruction, suffering on a scale greater even than that of the bystanders of American consumerism. At the same time, Ferlinghetti seems almost to allude to the inevitable tragic ending of Icarus. Ovid’s Icarus falls from the sky on destroyed wings, and from Ferlinghetti’s nuclear clouds come “myriad wingless crowds/ of nutless nagasaki survivors.”
Stylistically, the two poets are very different. Ovid writes in a very factual and direct manner that flows easily, utilizing more traditional metaphors and similes. Ferlinghetti writes with a choppy, more visual style, often drifting into stream-of-consciousness narratives or free association. However, both poets write in a manner that is raw and emotional, avoiding pedantry and embracing simplicity. Their work contains poignant scenes of suffering filled with regret and the realization of the instinctual hubris of humanity. Their stories and stark imaginings represent the long-standing role of the artist in critiquing society. Embracing art and values over materialism and genius, Ovid and Ferlinghetti show how the inventions take over the inventors; “the more it, the less we.”