Poetry after World War II

Paradoxically, of all the forms of writing, poetry seems to be the form that was most vibrant during the second half of the 20th century, although one late 20th-century critic remarked that there might have been more poets in Italy than readers of poetry. An authoritative 1,200-page anthology by two experts in the field, poet Maurizio Cucchi and critic of contemporary literature Stefano Giovanardi, Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento, 1945–1995 (1996; “Italian Poets of the Second Half of the 20th Century, 1945–1995”), introduced a useful taxonomy. Cucchi and Giovanardi recognized that, in talking about the new poetry, they had to take into account the older, established poets who continued to write and publish verse in their mature years and who inevitably influenced the emerging poets. Included among these prewar “masters” were Attilio Bertolucci, an autobiographical narrative poet from the countryside near Parma and the father of the movie director Bernardo; Mario Luzi, a pillar of ivory-tower Hermeticism before the war who in the politically committed 1960s turned to more existential and ultimately religious themes; the delicate and deceptively facile Giorgio Caproni, whose simplicity, psychological introspection, and nostalgia for a hidden God may remind the reader at times of Umberto Saba; Vittorio Sereni, a sensitive intellectual who dramatized the sympathies and hesitations of the nondoctrinaire reformer; the mercurial nonconformist Pier Paolo Pasolini; the Brechtian Franco Fortini, who was the conscience of a generation; and the ironical social observer Roberto Roversi. All of these poets, and a few of those mentioned below, were already represented in Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo’s standard anthology of 20th-century poetry, Poeti italiani del Novecento (1978; “Italian Poets of the 20th Century”).

Poets of the so-called Fourth Generation—from the title of a 1954 anthology of postwar verse edited by Pietro Chiara and Luciano Erba—include Erba himself and the poet and filmmaker Nelo Risi, both of them Milanese, as well as the Italian Swiss Giorgio Orelli. All three are from northern Italy and, along with Roberto Rebora and others, have been seen as the continuers of a hypothetical linea lombarda (“Lombard line”) of sober moral realism that, according to critic Luciano Anceschi, originated with Giuseppe Parini. Other Fourth Generation poets of note are epigrammatist Bartolo Cattafi; Rocco Scotellaro, poet of the southern peasant and the most convincing practitioner of Neorealism in verse; the eloquent soliloquist and elegant metricist Maria Luisa Spaziani; Umberto Bellintani, who, though he continued to write, quit publishing in 1963; and the hypersensitive Alda Merini, for whose work critics find the oxymoron (Christian paganism, joyful grief, religious eroticism, mortal liveliness) a useful figure.

Both the linguistically inventive Andrea Zanzotto (see below Experimentalism and the new avant-garde) and the wry confessional autobiographer (or “autobiologist”) and macabre humorist Giovanni Giudici had an impact, as did colloquialist Giovanni Raboni, who was also linked with the sobriety and moral concerns of the linea lombarda; Giancarlo Majorino, who progressed from Neorealism to Sperimentalismo (“Experimentalism”); Giampiero Neri (pseudonym of Giampiero Pontiggia), influenced in his descriptive narratives by Vittorio Sereni; Giorgio Cesarano, another poetic narrator who abandoned poetry in 1969, before his subsequent suicide (1975); and Tiziano Rossi, whose dominant moral concern led to comparisons with the expressionist poets of the pre-World War I periodical La Voce.

Four notable mavericks whose isolated and idiosyncratic poetic activity claimed allegiance to no movement, generation, or school are the Sicilian aristocrat Lucio Piccolo, cousin of novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who in 1954 forwarded Piccolo’s then unpublished poems to an appreciative Eugenio Montale; the Calabrian Symbolist Lorenzo Calogero, who has been compared to Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Marie Rilke, Dino Campana, and Friedrich Hölderlin; experimentalist Fernando Bandini, who was equally at home in Italian and Latin, to say nothing of his ancestral Veneto dialect; and Michele Ranchetti, who between 1938 and 1986 produced a single book of philosophic poetry, La mente musicale (1988; “The Musical Mind”).

During the 1970s several younger poets began publishing. Among them were the scandal-seeking “Roman” poets Dario Bellezza and Valentino Zeichen. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Cesare Viviani made a Dadaist debut, but he went on to express in his later work an almost mystical impulse toward the transcendent. Patrizia Cavalli’s work suggests the self-deprecating irony of Crepuscolarismo. Maurizio Cucchi was another Milanese poet and critic assimilable to the linea lombarda; when faced with the collapse of the greater constructs, he found solace in little things. Other poets of the era include the “neo-Orphic” (or “neo-Hermetic”) Milo De Angelis and Giuseppe Conte; Gregorio Scalise, a paradoxical rationalizer of the irrational who has been compared to Woody Allen; the mysteriously apodictic and enigmatic Giuseppe Piccoli; antilyrical self-ironist Paolo Ruffilli; and Vivian Lamarque, whose childlike fairy-tale tone occasionally makes way for a mischievous home truth. Also notable are Mario Santagostini, whose early work described the drab outskirts of his native Milan but who moved on to more metaphysical monologues, and Biancamaria Frabotta, who combined militant feminism with an elevated lyric diction tending toward the sublime.

Of the poets born after 1950, mention should be made of the precocious Valerio Magrelli; Patrizia Valduga, whose poems take advantage of the rigidity of traditional metres to control otherwise rebelliously sensual subject matter; Roberto Mussapi, the melancholy meditator of transcendent mythologies; and, finally, Gianni D’Elia, whose antecedents have been traced to poets as remote from each other as the rapt and timeless Sandro Penna and the “realists” Pasolini and Roversi, the latter poets and their urgent and timely literary program associated with the periodical Officina.