Italy Literature Part II
Between Ungaretti and Montale, although they cannot really be said to be followers, there are some of the most valid poets of today, such as Salvatore Quasimodo, who carried out that fruitful reconciliation on his behalf, in an assiduous work of translator, especially from Greek poets. with the classics; Adriano Grande, intended to always better harmonize discourse and melody; and – younger – Leonardo Sinisgalli, happy above all in his hastily elegiac forms and tones; Alfonso Gatto, whom the most rigorous hermeticism sometimes manages to reconcile with that singing vein, with those echoes of Di Giacomo, connatural to him; Libero de Libero, which is to be preferred where, on an epigram rhythm, the fable of childhood turns into hallucinated landscapes; and again: Sandro Penna, Mario Luzi, Vittorio Sereni, Giorgio Bassani, Margherita Guidacci. Apart from, although they too relate to the experiences of pure poetry, Sibilla Aleramo must be remembered, who certainly her native D’Annunzio often manages to redeem in an almost magical amazement of moods and musical chords; Girolamo Comi, who from the anthroposophical forms of a hermeticism to Onofri has reached the clarity of a Christian vision of life, giving ever more harmonious expression to his world full of secret germinations; and Carlo Betocchi, who certain air of popular song, of an affable realism, elegiacally transposes in ineffable superrealities of dreams.
But hermeticism understood in this way, if it is a phenomenon of such importance that it also affects poets of different origins and backgrounds (like a Betti), or even opposing it (like a Cardarelli); however, it cannot be identified with all the poetry of today. Umberto Saba stands out among these poets who, with the definitive edition of the Canzoniere (1945), offered us his poetic autobiography, dominated by an expiatory sense of pain, by a biblical fatality, and yet so fervently mixed with aspects and events of his Trieste, so solicitous to the illusions or invitations of love. Poetry of medium tone, almost “spoken”, and still faithful, in metrics and vocabulary, to tradition: but its lyrical power is such as to often elevate one and renew the others.
As for dialect poetry, always flourishing in Italy, it should be noted how pure poetry has made its influence felt even on its new authors. Once all historical or folkloric interest has fallen, they appear as “minor” lyrics, which use the dialect for a subtle, ironic counterpoint to certain sentimental motifs (such as Virgilio Giotti from Trieste); or rather for a precious underlining or mixture of verbal values, according to a taste that could be defined as “macaronic” (like the Roman Mario Dell’Arco). Poetry in dialect, therefore, more than dialectal poetry: and of the tradition that comes from Belli to Pascarella (whose posthumous and unfinished Storia nostra has disappointed), the last descendant remains, with free and witty spirits, Trilussa.
According to Topschoolsintheusa, the panorama of prose is much more complex: unlike that of poetry, which is quite unitary in tendencies, as young people find themselves grappling with the same expressive problems as the elderly, it is varied not only in tendencies, but also in terms of trends. genres, of forms, of ways. Which is also the diversity of literary generations, since writers trained in a given period, in the same spiritual and cultural climate, cannot fail to appear united – above the individuality of temperaments – by certain preferences of taste, by certain consonances of poetics and attitudes.
Thus the writers who, moving from fragmentism (see App. I, p. 618), matured between the first pre-war and the post-war period, between La Voce and La Ronda, and who by now – with the disappearance of Panzini, Pirandello, Deledda – constitute the generation ” elderly “, remained faithful, for the most part, to the” prose of art “, the” essay “, the” elzeviro “, mixed in invention and reflection, lyrical inspiration and critical conscience. If anything, some of them, such as Emilio Cecchi, Bruno Barilli, Alberto Savinio, have come to accentuate their original metaphysical disposition in a magical or surreal sense. And it is no coincidence that they are also expert writers in other arts, either for critical knowledge or for direct practice. Of those arts – music, painting – in which those irrational yeasts appear to operate no less, and perhaps more, than in literature. Cecchi especially gave us, in America amara (1939) and in the last Corse al trotto (1941), new, admirable examples of his visual and analogical faculty, fueled, together, by a very refined culture and by a fabulous feeling of nature, of the unprecedented, of the primitive, which is almost an escape from it. Other writers, such as Antonio Baldini and Vincenzo Cardarelli, have instead more adhered to the “classic” lesson of the Ronda: even if the increasingly malicious classicism of a Baldini is strictly related to his love for form, plastically and sensually understood. Finally, others, such as Soffici and Papini, have rather distorted than developed their youthful impressionism, especially the latter.
