Carducci lends his early commune the features of both Roman political pragmatism and Christian transcendentalism: Roman still in the forms of its administration (consul and senate), Christian in its spirit (Mass and the veneration of the Madonna)—its tiny population buoyed up by the blended ideals of Roman virtus and Christian hope. an evocation of the glorious past of the region, significant in the history of the three Italic races: Umbrians, Etruscans and Romans. “Piemonte” is a poem which, like its author, is full of minor imperfections, but seems to express the charged atmosphere and the political conscience of Italians of Carducci's generation. Niobe: a symbol of maternal bereavement. He can now only write short things, but his mind is quite awake and as bright as ever. Amphitrite: wife of the sea-god Poseidon (Neptune), sister to Galatea. As he grew older his poetic imagination lost the ardour needed to fuse his literary and historical learning into poetry. Its weird majesty, its sombre and terrible imagery, its dire pursuing phantasmagoria of the raving Giovanna, the beheaded Marie Antoinette, the despoiled and murdered Montezuma, the grim Huitzilopotli, and the other vengeful Aztec divinities, remind us of the awful “Binding Hymn” of the Furies in the Eumenides of Æschylus. Their unhealthy yearnings after Hellenism bring them nothing of Hellenic blitheness; the wine of Circe is to them a cup that inebriates but does not cheer. At the age of twenty he graduated with a degree in philosophy and letters from the University of Pisa. Such an impression of motion in immobility, or energy in stasis, is one of the ambiguities, perhaps the most important one, that contribute to the mystery of midday. Naz., VIII, 408. “Now I love to lose myself, far from mankind, in Lydia's languid eyes, where unknown desires and mysteries float.”, “Like a man who wanders beneath the summer moon … and feels a desire of unknown loves weigh on his heart with a lazy sweetness, and would wish to lose himself in the mute glimmer and fade away.”. … It is, in a word, the romantic Greece, or rather Hellas, of the Parnassians, fixed once for all in the prose and verse of Théophile Gautier, Louis Ménard, Leconte de Lisle.12, The picture of the serene Hellenic world recurs in Carducci's “Fantasia” (1875), which is to be studied side by side with Baudelaire's “Parfum exotique,” the poem with a significantly romantic title, which has inspired it:13. Strange to say, although Rome is foremost in Carducci's mind, he only visited Rome for the first time in 1874, on which occasion he only stayed a few days. Wayward and wilful, to be sure, hot-tempered and quick to tears, proud as Lucifer and unselfconscious as a child, a mixture of hero and enfant terrible, generous, laborious, and brave, he answers to the sociologist's definition of genius, he is the eternal adolescent. Carducci, it is true, was surpassed by none in his love for Greece. Carducci also vehemently opposed the monarchy and the Catholic Church, believing them to be responsible for inhibiting progress towards the unification of Italy. That was more than the poet would allow to be said about his beloved mother, and he wired at once, stating, “My mother was born in Florence.” Of this Florentine origin he was very proud, and justly so considering how the name of Florence has been for ages associated with Italian literature. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. He sings “Sicilia e Rivoluzione.” Then in the second book of Levia Gravia, he chants “Per la Proclamazione del Regno d'Italia” [“For the Proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy”]; and “In Morte di G. B. Niccolini” [“On the Death of G. B. Niccolini”]; “Roma o morte;” “Dopo Aspromonte” [“After Aspromonte”]; “Carnevale;” “Per la Rivoluzione di Grecia” [“The Greek Revolution”]; “Per il Trasporto delle Reliquie di Ugo Foscolo in Santa Croce” [“Transfer of the Remains of Ugo Foscolo to Santa Croce”]; all political and heroic poems. Look for popular awards and laureates in different fields, and discover the history of the Nobel Prize. naiads: nymphs of rivers, pools and streams; their ‘tawny sisters’ the oreads, nymphs of the mountainsides. Ah, from my first years, O Glory, I hid thy proud love in the proud silences of my heart. His poems were awaited by his followers with an anticipation of beauty that was never disappointed. Classicists there have always been, men who would revive the fair spirit of Greece through the renewal of her prosodical forms. Having suffered so many trials, the poet finally freed himself of that sort of fieriness which sometimes kept him from being poetical. Carducci, on the contrary, like many another poet, scribbled verses when a mere child; and of his published poems several date from his seventeenth year. Carducci, surrounded by the countless art treasures of Italy, wrote nothing of pictures. In July, 1857, the first book of poems by Giosuè Carducci appeared, the Rime. Twenty years after, on the occasion of a General Municipal Election, Carducci's name came out at the top of the poll, which clearly shows in what high estimation our poet was held by his adopted town. Strange as it may sound, neither poet wrote love poems. In the poem, which turns on the contrast between the light of day and (classically) the shadows of the shores of the dead, Carducci refers also to the suicide of his brother Dante in 1857 (‘O thou …), and to the death of his father Michele, which occurred within a few months of each other. Richard Wagner, contemporary composer of operas, whom Carducci admired. This elegiac ode (for metre see notes to ‘Nella piazza di San Petronio’, …) was written by Carducci following an excursion with Annie Vivanti, in August 1898, into the mountainous upper reaches of the Val de Gressoney (Italian Alps). “Vendette della Luna” [“Moon's Revenge”] is a lunar landscape seen above a moon-white girl, and in it are visual touches of rare lightness, “a green night of April,” and a sweet and gentle ending: Then there is the “Notte di Maggio” [“May Night”], a Petrarchan sonnet, elegant in its purely melodic play of rhymes and echoes: notte, stelle, onde, verde, colli, luna. Corte Carducci offers an apartment with exposed stone walls in Bari, 100 metres from Basilica of Saint Nicholas and a 3-minute walk from Bari promenade. The poet also personally chose and brought together in one volume his most representative prose writings. In each of these poems there are passages of high beauty; for example, the opening of “Piemonte,” which begins like a majestic dance, or the beginning of the second part of the ode to Ferrara: “O pensive land fading out to sea in the lowering sullen air, between gray sands and motionless pools of water, now shaded only by a few oaks, where rarely the wild boar roots,” and so on. ‘Alla memoria di D. C.’, 17. ‘Laudato sia. His republican political views gave way to acceptance of the monarchy with the annexation of Rome to the Italian kingdom. … Composed in December 1873, ‘Su l'Adda’ is written in asclepiadean stanzas (quatrains of 11,11,7,7 syllabic lines, unrhymed), and is the first of Carducci's attempts at his ‘barbarous’ adaptations of classical poetic forms. Even the sonnet he made harder by limiting himself to two sets of rhymes for all the fourteen lines. who wish to transport Lina to the the home of the gods on Mount Olympus, as the naiads who in ancient time had conveyed Hylas. Additional coverage of Carducci's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vol. “La Canzone di Legnano,” epically serene and sorrowful, sketches in whole hendecasyllables almost without syntactical breaks, the victory of the Lombard over Barbarossa, and the figure of Alberto di Giussano stands out in masculine greatness: “And his voice like thunder in May.”. In Virgil's own land his Georgics make an appeal scarcely understood by those only familiar with the rougher field-work of the North; and on this homelier aspect of his genius Carducci dwelt with peculiar fondness at the dedication of the monument to him in his native Mantua. “Giosuè Carducci.” In Italian Literature: The Dominant Themes, pp. After acquiring his teaching certificate and degree in Philosophy and Philology (Classics), Carducci began teaching Rhetoric (Latin Language and Literature) at San Miniato al Tedesco, a local university near Florence. This volume is full of beauty and full of ideas, but few individual poems can be conceded to contain both. Tarquin, Lars Porsena, the virgin Camilla and Turnus were in it, and went about extinguishing all the gasjets, and unearthing ancient lamps from the sepulchre of Tarquinia and the Etruscan tombs. If they do not necessarily treat different subjects, they look at these subjects from a widely different standpoint. The articulation of the poem's moods is part of its message. If the pagan world as compared with the Christian seemed to him as sunlight to darkness, classicism beside romanticism was as sunlight to moonlight. This antagonism was reconciled by his national feeling. He was early attracted to the Greek and Roman authors; in addition, he conscientiously studied the Italian classics: Dante, Tasso, and Alfieri. In 1891 there were 5 Carducci families living in Lancashire. This sensation will be readily recognized as true by the reader, but I offer another poetic testimony to it in the following lines from Wordsworth's “Airey-Force Valley”: This too must necessarily bring to mind Leopardi's “L'infinito” where the wind's rustling is an image of the flow of time, of the present “age” that is “flowing” into the infinite “sea” of silence. Among Carducci's earliest works of verse, the provocatively titled Inno a Satana (1865; which may be translated as Hymn to Satan) praises the poet's ‘pagan’ principals of reason and rebellion. There are praises of a people, or of a district, such as the odes “Piemonte,” “Cadore,” “Alla città di Ferrara,” “Bicocca San Giacomo,” “Le due Torri” [“The Two Towers”], “La Moglie del Gigante” [“The Giants's Wife”], “Davanti il castel vecchio di Verona” [“Before the Old Castle of Verona”], “A una Bottiglia di Valtellina del 1848” [“A Bottle of 1848 Vintage Valtellina”]. He had a voracious appetite for books; and, which is not always the case, his digestion was as good as his appetite. He suggests, somewhat, Walter Savage Landor, so exquisitely polished an artist, yet a personality so burly, and might almost as well have sat for the caricaturing portrait of Boythorn. 428 (April 1909): 338-62. When Carducci wrote these words, he had just begun to make a direct acquaintance of the great foreign romantic writers. Buy Carducci. He had begun, as will be readily guessed, a red Republican, but as he saw the heroes of the Risorgimento pass and leave the stage to lesser men, he came to agree with the wise Cavour that Italy was not ripe for democratic government, and to acquiesce in a kingdom under the house of Savoy. Ilissos: the river which descends through Attica in Greece, to the S. and S.E. The temperament indeed of our leading poets has been in this respect at one with that of the nation at large, and has kept our poetry further from rhetoric than that of our neighbours. The only leading English poet of a rhetorical turn is Byron; and this is probably one of the chief reasons why his popularity is greater on the Continent than in England. Italian modern literature has no greater representative than Giosue Carducci, a true-born poet of lofty ideals, to which he gave such a sublime form as to make him classic in his own times. The Odi Barbare also have given occasion to more than one important article from the pens of Italian critics. In 1856 he received his doctor's degree and the degree for teaching. It has been ascribed, and French critics characteristically accept this view, to his great admiration for the gracious Queen Margherita, whose long friendship for him was published when, a few years before his death, she purchased his library to preserve it from being scattered. …. E non avrei mai creduto di dover più amare! In breve, siamo nel mezzo di una gravissima crisi. Saturn was reputed the earliest King of Rome, a god also of agriculture, whose reign was considered the Age of Gold. [In the following article, Praz maintains that though Carducci scorned romanticism, his poetry shows romantic tendencies.]. Carducci considered Heine (whom he too translated) a model of the sublime, rebellious, anti-authoritarian poet, and Zendrini the model of the effete, arcadian, sentimentalist poetaster. The well-known Florentine publisher, Gaspare Barbera, was then at the outset of his prosperous career, and having decided to publish a small diamond collection of classic works, entrusted to Carducci the writing of the prefaces and notes for the same. Among the newest and most inward historical odes of Carducci—and among the most beautiful of modern poetry—are the odes entitled “Sui Campi di Marengo” [“On the Fields of Marengo”], “Faida di Commune” [“A Communal Feud”], and “Il Comune rustico” [“The Rustic Commune”]. The poet had repudiated any poems which testified to a romantic immediacy, and here he soberly published what best represented him. He says: ‘In the Juvenilia I am the humble shield-bearer of classicism; in the Levia Gravia, I keep my first vigil of arms; in the Decennalia—after a few somewhat uncertain lance-strokes—I enter on the career of knight-errant at my own sole risk and peril.’ It is interesting to observe how the future author of the Odi Barbare is foreshadowed even in the earliest of the Juvenilia. The cathedral before which the poet stands contains cool shade but also the tombs of the dead. it On a little street in Singapore Stefano Carducci. The irony of the sexual innuendo is not to be missed. A new opportunity presented itself the following year when the minister of education appointed him the Chair of Literature at the renowned University of Bologna. This same contrast of ideals explains their differing attitude towards romanticism and mediaevaldom. ‘Why turn back?’, “‘My child,’ he answered, ‘easy it was and a joy to lead a band of eager youths to the ringing words ‘Republic’ and ‘Freedom.’ All young Italy followed with shouts and cheers. It may seem strange to say it of one whose fame is so closely associated with the revival of old metrical forms, but Carducci's interest in prosody was as much spiritual and political as artistic. As he watches the devotional processions crossing the Forum Romanum the sense of historic drama that fascinated Gibbon is merged in patriotic anger. The chords of passion struck so boldly by the youth of twenty-three soon died away. Although here, close to nature, the ultimate truths may perhaps be found, and life, as far as it is able, could bring satisfaction, the attempt to recreate that life would be to risk further futility, a further confirmation of his failure. In 1868 the volume Levia Gravia appeared; then in 1871 the volume of Poesie, which, in addition to the preceding collections, contained the Giambi ed Epodi and is divided into three parts: Decennali (1860-1870); Levia Gravia (1857-1860); and the Nuove Poesie (1872). For a general appraisal, see Introduction. Satan is left victorious in the realm of the material world (37-41), having witnessed the ‘rusting’ of Michael's sword, the impotence of the Creator, and the fall of the faithful angels. That neglected life might have been one as small landowner and farmer, married to his youthful (probably fictitious, certainly idealised) love Maria, a country girl of fine physique and glowing health, potential mother of sturdy children: a life lived in avoidance of the siren snares of philosophical speculation, but dedicated the rather to salubrious activity, honest toil, prolific paternity, close to nature according to the ancient Roman ideal. The poet says, “Pour out, atop the luminous hill, pour, friends, the blond wine, and let the sun be refracted in it. Even the decadent Leopardi was at his finest in the ‘Canzone all' Italia’ and the ‘Monumento di Dante’; the best known verses of the romantic Manzoni, ‘Il Cinque Maggio,’ were written on the death of Napoleon. And in the ode entitled “Roma,” he said: “I do not come to thee curious about little things: Who looks for butterflies under the Arch of Titus?” But he gave a still more austere, almost religious feeling of the Roman spirit in the ode “Dinanzi alle terme di Caracalla” [“Before the Baths of Caracalla”] with that severe landscape: “Between the Celio and the Aventine the clouds run darkly: the wind blows damp from the dreary plain: in the background stand the Alban Hills, white with snow.” He describes the place in solemn, awe-struck lines, and in contrast to the present time which those Baths recall. Carducci was for some time at the University of Pisa, and there devoted himself chiefly to classical studies. In less tangible matters also than religious and political opinion, in that general outlook on life in which differences and likenesses elude classification, these men were inwardly at one with their fellow-citizens. The ‘pie stelle,’ that voyage over the head of the poet at Desenzano, are no longer lucid shapes fulfilling their destiny without heed to mankind, as in one of the early sonnets; they are become Virgil's ‘conscia fati sidera.’ Indeed, although in this epithet of ‘pie,’ recurring again and again after the ancient manner, lingers no doubt the ancient suggestion of natural duties accomplished, yet it bears also its present Italian meaning of clement, pitiful, the old Virgilian pietas passing into that modern pitifulness of which Virgil had such strange foreshadowings. … The poem had earlier borne the alternative title ‘Antiverismo’, in vindication of the imaginative and mythopoetic faculties of poets against the claims of current realist trends in Italian literature (the verismo of such as Capuana and Verga). The ‘skulls’ are those of the victims of Church and Monarchy, held guiltily in the hands of the two sculpted figures who, kneeling in an abject plea for mercy, symbolise the two institutions. With Signor Alessandro d'Ancona and Signor Adolfo Bartoli, Carducci has renewed in Italy historical criticism as applied to Belles Lettres, and he became the centre and mainspring of a new form of criticism. Already mitres and crowns are tottering; rebellion growls from the cloister, and fights and preaches beneath the cowl of Fra Girolamo Savonarola. For him, Maria's ‘fianco baldanzoso’ and ‘restio seno’ clash with the preceding Leopardian echoes in 7-8 (‘Ove sei? The last part of ‘La chiesa di Polenta’ (11.101-128) returns to the idyllic mood of the opening stanzas, in what is at once a celebration, vindication and encouragement of a new era of Italian consciousness. His abode was a single bedroom; his time was spent in work and studies; his only pastime was meeting some congenial friends, with whom classic authors were read and discussed. The boy went to finish his studies in the humanities and rhetoric with the padres of the Scuole Pie [religious schools] and stayed there until 1852. There are also various essays in the volumes Primi Saggi, Studi Saggi e Discorsi, Bozzetti e Scherme [Sketches and Polemics], Poesia e Storia, Confessioni e Battaglie, as well as in Ceneri e faville [Ashes and Sparks]. Carducci never was of this or that party, though some of his writings might have occasionally favoured one or the other political tendency; but he was throughout his long and glorious life a patriot in the truest meaning of the expression, both in his severe rebukes and his warm praises. It is also a fine example of Carducci's iconographic classicism (the Junoesque features of Maria), as well as of his sensitive treatment of Italian landscape (here, that of the coastal plain of the Maremma). Carducci, who knew this fully well, forcibly attacked the Ministry, with the result that he was suspended from teaching, and was charged with having committed acts of rebellion. In vivid colors, he presents the virile magnanimity of the Roman spirit as opposed to the weak, stagnant life of the new Italians. Then in 1899 hemiplegia deprived him of the use of one hand and made speech difficult. Carducci's aim is therefore to restore to the role of poet the severe intellectual and moral commitment of a Dante, Italy's ‘miglior fabbro’ and conscience of the nation. Carducci is in the middel of Como old city. This occurred in the struggle between the renewed alliance of autonomous northern Italian cities and an imperial army from Modena, led by Enzo, bent on their subjugation to imperial authority. the Ennean maid: Persephone (Proserpina), daughter of Zeus and Demeter, was carried off by Pluto to the Underworld as she gathered flowers in the meadows of Enna in Sicily. In his preface to his collected poems, inscribed to Watts-Dunton, Swinburne refused to recant, proclaiming each early poem of dalliance the result of a mood justified by its sincerity and spontaneity. His corrective for them was Nature and Reason, the classic spirit. No? It is quite possible that Carducci's use of the metaphor of drowning to speak of the surrender of the self may be an echo from Leopardi's “L'infinito,” although it is a common enough image in the writings of religious mystics. They are political rather than strictly literary. But what Carducci saw in them were not the more deeply romantic aspects, but rather a rhetoric of contrasts and antitheses, of strained and violent images, which are no more romantic than baroque; such flashes of style as: “Laissez passer Caïn! The obvious didactic lesson is the emulation of the ancient Romans. Occasionally he was very much discussed, not for his literary merits—which were universally admitted as being unsurpassable—but owing to a fanciful interpretation given to his political writings, now by one political party, then by another. Aprite le braccia al dolente. A decline in quality characterizes his last collection Rime e ritmi (1898, The Lyrics and Rhythms), because of a certain mannerism which permeates many of the poems. The studies on Cino da Pistoia, Dante, Petrarch, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Parini, and the erotic poets of the eighteenth century retain their value for the contemporary student of Italian literature. i.e. Sulla: according to early histories, Florence was founded by veterans of the army of the dictator, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in the 1st century b.c. Compare for form their odes on the proclamation of the French Republic, both written September 1870, their poems to Victor Hugo, on the anniversary of the Battle of Mentana, on the death of Giovanni Cairoli—the last of the four sons of Signora Cairoli to die for Italy. The slim campanile which dominates the scene dates from the 11th century, when Italy (as the poem reminds us) finally shook itself free from the superstitious terrors of the millennium, through a recovered faith in the natural world (witnessed in the Quattrocento art of Mino da Fiesole referred to in the final tercet).