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‘Poeta che mi guidi’: Dantean afterlives in the poetry of Giorgio Caproni, Antonia Pozzi, Vittorio Sereni and Mario Luzi
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Date
2024
Authors
Galassini, Dario
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Publisher
University College Cork
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Abstract
This study explores the enduring influence of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia on Italian literature and culture by focusing on episodes of readerly engagement and literary appropriation in the practices of four middle-generation poets (Moliterni 2021), all born between 1912 and 1914: Giorgio Caproni, Antonia Pozzi, Vittorio Sereni and Mario Luzi. The central argument of this study is that the four authors, who represent a cohesive poetic group within the generation itself for a variety of reasons, stand out as particularly exemplary and influential agents of the creative reception of Dantean poetics in the twentieth-century Italian literary panorama.
The contribution aligns with Coolahan’s definition of reception (2020) to assess Dante’s impact on the manifold poetic developments of the Italian Novecento. Its fundamental research questions address matters of poetic influence, canon formation and literary monumentality.
Rather than focusing on the poets individually, the project works on and further develops existing lines of contact between one another to explore transversal evolutionary trajectories that manifested consistently throughout the century. It centres on three main case studies that shed light on different understandings and modalities of engagement with the Commedia.
Particular attention is dedicated to the poet Antonia Pozzi, who stands out for her significant marginalisation and consequently scarce literary recognition accorded to her, even in academic contexts. In this study, her engagement with Dante’s works is not only studied in relation to her own poetic production but also investigated via her personal Dante volumes as collected in her private library – either primary texts or secondary literature on the Medieval author. The study of the many marginalia in such texts proves informative of both her engagement with Dante and the school system that was in place in Italy during the 1920s as well as the contemporary debate on arts and humanities. Her poetic oeuvre, which has hitherto never been studied in relation to Dante, showcases interesting traces of the Dantean model. Pozzi responded to the Commedia in a personal way, most frequently elaborating on its central archetype of the journey, declined either in its infernal connotations or as a purgatorial ascent.
The second case study of this contribution looks at the poetic works of the four authors as they modelled a new poetic form that opened to inclusiveness (Montale 1964). Pozzi is presented in her role as a forerunner of some of the century’s most important instances in terms of poetic linguistic advancements, with correlated implications on the positioning of the poetic Self. The study demonstrates how Dante played a pivotal role in shaping such poetic transformative experiences, proposing an inclusive textual model that can welcome dialogues and other prose elements. This shift eventually allowed twentieth-century poetry to dismiss the prevailing arguments of idealist thinking and its corollary of artistic effects with the predominance of lyrical and Hermetic stylemes.
The study concludes by further analysing the nature of the new poetic Self as shaped by such inclusive poetry fashioned on the Dantean rather than the Petrarchan literary model. Drawing from socio-cultural readings of modernity that address episodes of permanent liminality (Szakolczai 2000, 2017) and the crisis of presence (De Martino 1956, 1973), selected poems of the authors elucidate the appropriations of the Dantean dichotomy of body and shade as well as the role of light as a dehumanising agent. Not only did the Commedia’s dialogic and plurilinguistic character help them frame a new poetic diction, but it ultimately granted them an image reservoir to draw from to represent best a new poetic Self that cannot describe its identity and can only thrive in an in-between position, as neither human nor non-human.
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Keywords
Italian literature , Italian poetry , Contemporary poetry , Medieval literature , Canon , Dante Alighieri , Dante Studies , Reception Studies , Intertextuality
Citation
Galassini, D. 2024. ‘Poeta che mi guidi’: Dantean afterlives in the poetry of Giorgio Caproni, Antonia Pozzi, Vittorio Sereni and Mario Luzi. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.