Poet Laureate

If “Expect No Light Verse From San Francisco’s Poet” (Feb. 16) is correct, then Lawrence Ferlinghetti got it wrong when he consulted Plato’s “Republic” on the role of the poet as gadfly. There is no place in a well-ordered commonwealth for the poet, Socrates says. His creations are “poor things by the standard of truth and reality” and he appeals “not to the highest part of the soul, but to one which is equally inferior.” If we let them, poets will set up a “vicious form of government in the individual soul.”

That may make Ferlinghetti an ideal poet laureate for San Francisco, but only a philosopher can wear the gadfly’s laureate. Sorry!

TOM ROBISCHON

Culver City