In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See (1958). Summary and Description

“In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See” is also a meditation on a work of art, this time referring to works by the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya, who lived and painted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His work is known for being dramatic and for often focusing on individuals or groups of people in dramatic situations. In this poem, Ferlinghetti makes an argument similar to the one in “Monet’s Lilies Shuddering,” an argument about the transcendence and applicability of art. What draws the speaker of the poem to Goya’s paintings is the way in which they present the “people of the world / exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of ‘suffering humanity’” (ll. 1-2).

It is the explicit moment of human suffering that captures the speaker’s imagination and draws him into Goya’s paintings. The speaker describes in vivid detail the suffering he witnesses in these paintings, telling us that the people he sees “writhe upon the page in a veritable rage of adversity / Heaped up groaning with babies and bayonets under cement skies” (ll. 3-4). The dramatic scenes the speaker is witnessing capture his imagination to the point that he believes they might be real.

At this point, the poem takes a sudden turn, and the setting of the poem is no longer Goya’s work but America. Goya’s figures “are so bloody real,” the speaker tells us, “it is as if they still existed / And they do / Only the landscape is changed” (ll. 4-6). The change that the speaker notes is his own shift of perspective from the scenes in Goya’s paintings to scenes of contemporary America. He insists that the people in Goya’s painting are now part of America’s urban landscape, telling us, “They are the same people only further from home on freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent” (l. 8).

The shift in setting is significant, because it highlights the fact that although the scenery has changed, the people, their struggles, and the desolation of their surroundings have not; they are now simply residing in a different kind of desolate landscape: America. Ferlinghetti makes two significant points in this poem: one, that works of art, despite being painted centuries ago, are still aesthetically and culturally relevant today, and, two, that present-day America and the people residing in it seem to be no better off than those human figures who are suffering in Goya’s paintings. Ferlinghetti thus implies that art can be a vehicle for social change if we pay attention to the lessons it attempts to teach us and apply those lessons to the modern world that we inhabit.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Compare “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes” with “Monet’s Lilies Shuddering.” What differences do you note in Ferlinghetti’s views regarding the power of art?

2. According to the poem’s speaker, what are the chief functions of art?

3. Compare “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes” with John Keats’s “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” What attitudes does Keats have toward older works of poetry? How does Keats’s stance compare with the attitude of the speaker in Ferlinghetti’s poem?