Hermeticism, modernist poetic movement originating in Italy in the early 20th century, whose works were characterized by unorthodox structure, illogical sequences, and highly subjective language. Although it influenced a wide circle of poets, even outside Italy, it remained inaccessible to the larger public.
Hermeticism originated in the 19th-century poetry and poetic theory of Novalis and Poe as used by the French Symbolist poets, particularly Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, and Rimbaud. The term was particularly applied to the 20th-century Italian poets whose forerunner was Arturo Onofri and whose primary exponent and leader was Giuseppe Ungaretti. The formalistic devices of Hermeticism were partly an outgrowth of Futurism, a short-lived but influential movement that encouraged innovation in literary language and content. The cryptic brevity, obscurity, and involution of the Hermetics were forced upon them, however, by the intensive control over literature exerted by the Fascist regime in the interwar period.
Although two other poets who were to gain international repute, Salvatore Quasimodo and Eugenio Montale, were associated with the movement, its initial leader was Ungaretti, whose education in Paris had introduced him to French Symbolism. In his first volume of poems, Il porto sepolto (1916; “The Buried Port”), Ungaretti introduced an intense, purified sort of short lyric, from which punctuation, syntax, and structure had been eliminated to stress the evocative power of individual words. Montale (with Ossia di seppia, 1925; “Cuttlefish Bones”) and later Quasimodo (with Acque e terre, 1930; “Waters and Lands”) became his disciples. Ungaretti’s Sentimento del tempo (1933; “The Feeling of Time”) had an obscurity and abstruse symbolism that caused the critic Francesco Flora to name the movement, in a series of essays collected as La poesia ermetica (1936), after Hermes Trismegistos, reputed author of occult symbolic works and inventor of a magical airtight seal.
After World War II all three of Hermeticism’s major poets developed their own individual styles: Ungaretti incorporating more structure, and a more straightforward tone; Montale moving in the direction of greater human warmth and simplicity; and Quasimodo writing powerful, socially committed works. Quasimodo won the Nobel Prize in 1959, and Montale received it in 1975. Some Italian poets such as Leonardo Sinisgalli, Alfonso Gatto, and Mario Luzi persisted in the introverted, formalized Hermetic style, but its great poets had already passed on to work that was more universal.