Archivio d’Annunzio | 2022 | N. 9

The relationship between d’Annunzio and Pascoli, focused on Poemi conviviali and Alcyone, starts with the last lyric of d’Annunzio’s work, Il commiato, and the preface of Conviviali. The latter is a reply to d’Annunzio’s dedication and enunciates themes that, even if common to d’Annunzio, are developed with a different sensitivity and in a more direct comparison with classical sources. This is also reflected in lexical correspondences, for which it is difficult to identify debits and credits. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Pascoli personally takes up and re-proposes d’Annunzio’s suggestions.

The article discusses the relationship between d’Annunzio and the Crepuscular poets. Corazzini initially was an inconstant friend of d’Annunzio’s taste, but at the end of his life reconciles d’Annunzio’s flair for Nietzsche with mysticism and nationalistic ideology. In Turin both Graf and Thovez and the newspapers strongly fought the ideology of Superhumanism and the poet Gozzano showed how fake was d’Annunzio’s aestheticism, but at the same time could not and did not want to escape his influence, both in his verses and in his idea of literature (e.g. exploring and contradicting the model about the great antinomies Art/Life, Truth/Lie).

The parodic attention to d’Annunzio’s poetry and prose has been timely, rich and of various kinds. Following a chronological path, the essay examines the most significant texts in this field, with particular attention paid both to the most successful parodies (e.g. Luciano Folgore, Paolo Vita Finzi, Aldo Palazzeschi, Eugenio Montale) and to those that are still little-known and overlooked by the critics.

The article aims at verifying how Gabriele d’Annunzio’s idea of the correspondence between poetry and nature has influenced many Italian poets at the beginning of the 20th century, with particular regard to their choice of the free verse. Following the example of many poems of Alcyone (such as L’Onda or Le stirpi canore), many symbolist and futurist poets (e.g. Lucini, Buzzi, Soffici) employed the comparison with natural elements in order to explain their search for a new rhythm, free from the strictness of traditional forms. Moreover, this study suggests that d’Annunzio may have found inspiration in Walt Whitman for the development of this principle.

Ada Negri’s broad culture did not concern Gabriele d’Annunzio, whose name practically never appears in her literary work, nor in her correspondence; however, the influence of the Vate cannot be denied, as the comparative analysis of the works of both writers confirms. May be this lack of associa tion can be simply ascribed to a lack of empathy between the fiery writer from Lodi and the dandy author from Pescara.

This essay analyses d’Annunzio’s sources in Rebora’s work – in one case, it is the other way around – showing the latter’s consciously argumentative use of the source author, whose words are borrowed to overturn their ethical value. Thus, from d’Annunzio’s precious aestheticism, these words move on to Clemente Rebora’s harsh, morally pregnant poetry, acquiring a whole new colour. Beside many examples of specific intertextual relations, concerning first Frammenti lirici and then Canti anonimi and Poesie sparse, this paper also includes in-depth analysis of the peculiar ideology underlying the two poets’ work. The results of this research, tapping also into the Concordance, are copious. The final part of the essay presents a reflection about the two authors’ mental and stylistic attitude with respect to the War, delineating unforgettable moral portraits.

The essay aims to reconstruct, through the readings of the young Campana and the intertextuality between his and d’Annunzio’s work, the unbroken relationship between the two authors. We focus in particular on some thematic units, the roses, the chimera and the journey, with the awareness that ‘despised’ d’Annunzio has a large part in the construction of the Campana’s poetry collection, that even exhibits a first title of direct descent from d’Annunzio. Moreover, the d’Annunzio’s brand rules as well as in the Campana’s work also in his life, in that program of an inimitable live inverted, which takes its superomism, lived from below, to the second twentieth century beat generation.

This essay explores the traces that the reading of d’Annunzio’s works has left in journalistic texts, in the letters and in Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poems, and focuses on the ambivalent relationship that the poet born in Alexandria in Egypt established with the work and figure of the poet born in Pescara.

The article focuses on an anomalous situation of Italian criticism, concerning the relationship between the works of d’Annunzio and Montale: after the Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo’s inaugural study, dating back to 1966, utterly important but not exhaustive, only a few scholars have taken up partially the argument.

The article focuses on Cesare Pavese’s reading of d’Annunzio’s poetry, and particularly of the Laudi, that he carried on since his early youth. This interest is especially evidenced by an unpublished notebook of the high school period, partially reported in the appendix, in which Pavese cites and comments extensive passages from Maia, and by the many withdrawals from that work or from Alcyone that converge in his poems. Starting from this documentation, and from some statements in his diary, the reading of d’Annunzio’s poetry seems to be one of the roots of Pavese’s interpretation of classical myth.

In the interpretation of his trained readers Sandro Penna has been the object of a great misunderstanding. For a long time his relationship with the greatest poetical works of his time has been hidden; it happened the same with the authors he could read during a long training. The most recent studies about Penna’s intertextuality focused on citations, limiting themselves to compiling a register, without considering the long duration of international cultural processes to which Penna himself refers. The name of Gabriele d’Annunzio is that of a certain actor among these processes, dealing above all with the poetics of symbol.

This article explores Vittorio Sereni’s attitude towards the literary legacy of d’Annunzio, as expressed in particular in the poem “La poesia è una passione?”, in which Sereni explicitly quotes some lines from d’Annunzio’s Novilunio and appears to refer to a long, and apparently somewhat arduous, process of distancing himself from d’Annunzio’s cumbersome legacy in his early development as a poet. The main point that we try to make is that Sereni’s departure from d’Annunzio and the Liberty style is prompted not so much by a radical shift in poetic sensibility, but rather by a recognition that the world, and the social reality, have changed, and therefore require a renewal of the means of poetic expression. This is contrasted with the poetry of Montale, arguably the most influential Italian poet in the second half of the 20th century: we make the case that Montale’s innovation, decisively influenced by the English-language modernism, is much more radical, and involves not just an updating of the poetic language, but a more fundamental and theoretical renewal of the very idea of poetry and literature and of what they stand for.

“Before I was fifteen I had already ʻeatenʼ Pascoli and D’Annunzio…”, writes 32-year-old Andrea Zanzotto in a letter to Giuseppe Ungaretti. In this brief statement we can take the food metaphor literally, and ask ourselves whether d’Annunzio was better digested than Pascoli or vice versa; whether the Dannunzian dish was taken off the menu or just set aside due to its overt supermanhood, to the unacceptable public figure of the poet hero. Or whether, on the contrary, d’Annunzio’s work was considered as food to be occasionally tasted and chewed here and there again, for the incomparable ʻsearch for sonorities so new to the point of the absurdʼ.

The essay sets out to explore, on the one hand, the relationship that d’Annunzio and Pasolini had with myth and the sacred, and, on the other hand, to investigate, in an anthropological perspective, the causes and consequences of the ‘dissolution’ of values related to an ancestral and rural religiosity in modern and contemporary society.

Ancestrale is Goliarda Sapienza’s first and only poetic work written between the 1950s and 1960s. In the book she develops an interesting approach to vocabulary, building a part of her own poetics. Although critics have long dealt with Sapienza’s poetry, there is no study of her sources. This essay proposes some initial observations on the possibility that d’Annunzio’s Alcyone may have served as a model for Sapienza, through an analysis and a comparison of their poetic lexicon and of its frequencies.

The article studies the recurrent image of the hand in Il piacere, the first d’Annunzio’s work where the theme, appearing in his earlier works, takes on a central role. The essay shows how the author dwells on gestures and on hands because, referring to Leonardo’s theories and to the symbolist poetics of the end of the century, they would be the external manifestation of an individual’s character. The representation of the hand will be constant in d’Annunzio’s prose and poetry, where the chiromancer author relies on hand gestures to better represent the complicated psychological traits of his characters.