Strumenti critici | 2024 | N. 165

T.S. Eliot dedicated the final version of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, calling him «il miglior fabbro» after Guinizzelli’s definition of Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio XXVI. Setting out to investigate the continuities and the differences between the two writers, this article shows how extensively his revisions and suggestions shaped Eliot’s work.

Recognising Shakespeare’s presence as one of the most persistent in Eliot’s production, the article reflects on the multitude of intertextual paradigms present in The Waste Land, elaborating on the notion of tradition and the archetypes of literature.

Focusing on the presence of Wagnerian texts, themes and characters in The Waste Land, attention is drawn to the different techniques of the Leitmotiv and Eliot’s constructive use of the Wagnerian legacy, transformed into a technique for assembling the shatterings of modernity

This brief essay, based on a conference presentation for Per le strade della città irreale: 100 anni di Terra Desolata, convened by Alessandro Fabrizi, 19-21 October 2022, uses Virginia Woolf’s Diary as a map to consider the significance of the year 1922, with special reference to her relationship to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and to a shared experience of modernity.

By exploring the connection between Eliot’s poem and Western figurative tradition as experienced by Modernism, the article discusses the fragmented and intentionally broken nature of images in the poem, drawing parallels to the collage technique used by artists such as Braque and Picasso. The article delves into the challenge of identifying precise figurative references in The Waste Land and explores various interpretations and associations.

The article charts the evolution of the figure of Tiresias, exploring different variations of the myth and their contribution to the process of constructing meaning in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The article illustrates the content of the five-day event Cities as a place of poetry organized by the Association of Social Promotion «fluidonumero9» in collaboration with «369gradi» and the patronage of the Department of European American and Intercultural Studies of Sapienza University of Rome to celebrate the centenary of the publication of T.S. Eliot The Waste Land. The event included a three-day conference, two readings of the poem and two five-day workshops that took place in different locations across Rome from 17 to 21 October 2022.

Amelia Rosselli’s letters to Mario Trevi, held at the Centro Manoscritti of the University of Pavia and at Emanuele Trevi’s family archive, shed new light on Rosselli’s first decade in Rome, on her relationship with the intellectual milieu of the city as well as on her multilingual writing. As a pupil of the Jungian analyst Ernst Bernhard and animator of the journal Montaggio, Trevi is the ideal companion for Rosselli in the crucial years of her active engagement with poetry, politics, and philosophy. The fifty-one letters, which can be dated to 1956-1960, provide an insight into a longer friendship, which presumably began in the early 1950s and lasted until Rosselli’s death in 1996.

The article meticulously scrutinizes a recent anthology of Gianfranco Contini’s critical writings, curated by Uberto Motta. It aims to unveil the anthology’s purpose and organization, shedding light on its value and merits. This includes an analysis of its adept selection and commentary on individual texts through introductory notes, as well as its thorough introduction.

Despite its title, Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere is not a work of history but a reassessment. For Saba, the revised Canzoniere, published in 1945, was the “definitiveµ work to be presented to the future; Storia e cronistoria was its complement, which, by demolishing much of the body of earlier criticism (heavily influenced by Hermeticism), was intended to prepare the ground for a fresh reevalutation of his poetry. This essay traces the foundations for a new philological edition that should aim to document both the making of Saba’s poetry and the contemporary critical response to it.

The significance of Dante Alighieri’s presence in Émile Verhaeren’s Les Apparus dans mes chemins (1891), a collection by the Belgian symbolist poet, is substantial. Surprisingly, despite its importance, there has been a lack of critical attention to this aspect. This essay delves into Verhaeren’s often overlooked poetry collection, exploring its entirety to identify and analyze the precise and fundamental influences of Dante’s work.