Can someone help me to analyze the poem " Pity the nation" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti?

Answer 1

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I'd say anyone who is to be pitied is selfish and self-centered.
Those type of things can be said about individuals and a country.

COPIED FROM ONE SITE, ABOUT HIS POEM:

AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. So what about the state of the world today and our role in it?

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: It’s rushing over the cliff. I think practically all of Congress is totally ignoring the ecological crisis fast ascending on us. I mean, and so many people have even refused to see Al Gore’s movie—and I’m looking forward to seeing the new one, The Eleventh Hour—because people think that, “Oh, the calamities aren’t going to happen in my little corner right now. It might happen fifty years or a hundred years from now. I mean, my house isn’t going to be swept away. Or my house isn’t—or my life isn’t going to change. I’m always going to be able to drive to work.”

But it could change overnight. The ecosystem is so finely balanced that it could go out of balance overnight and crash like a computer by tomorrow morning. And not a single presidential candidate for the next election seems to have any really potent ecological program to save the world from this ecological disaster.

http://www.democracynow.org/2007/9/3/leg…



Catharsis: The release or purging of unwanted emotions—specifically fear and pity—brought about by exposure to art. The term was first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics to refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators. A famous example of catharsis is realized in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, when Oedipus discovers that his wife, Jacosta, is his own mother and that the stranger he killed on the road was his own father.

Ca·thar·sis (kə-thär'sĭs)
n., pl. -ses (-sēz).
Medicine. Purgation, especially for the digestive system.
A purifying or figurative cleansing of the emotions, especially pity and fear, described by Aristotle as an effect of tragic drama on its audience.
**A release of emotional tension, as after an overwhelming experience, that restores or refreshes the spirit.**
Psychology.
A technique used to relieve tension and anxiety by bringing repressed feelings and fears to consciousness.
The therapeutic result of this process; abreaction.




Hoping to be helpful!
God bless!