What was the title of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s first poetry collection, published in 1955?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s first poetry collection, published in 1955, was Pictures of the Gone World.

The book appeared as number one in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, the small-format series Ferlinghetti established through his San Francisco bookstore and publishing house. Its poems helped define the accessible, performance-oriented style associated with City Lights and the wider Beat scene.

Ferlinghetti became best known internationally for A Coney Island of the Mind, published in 1958. That later collection sold widely and is therefore sometimes mistaken for his first book of poems. Pictures of the Gone World came three years earlier and has a more compact, experimental presentation.

The collection also matters because it links Ferlinghetti’s identities as poet, bookseller, and publisher. City Lights published important Beat writing, including Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, but Ferlinghetti’s own first Pocket Poets volume launched the series before that famous legal controversy.