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An incisive, unified account of modern poetry in the Western tradition, arguing that the emergence of the lyric as a dominant verse style is emblematic of the age of the individual.Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, poetry in the West was transformed. The now-common idea that poetry mostly corresponds with the lyric in the modern sense—a genre in which a first-person speaker talks self-referentially—was foreign to ancient, medieval, and Renaissance poetics. Yet in a relatively short time, age-old habits gave way. Poets acquired unprecedented freedom to write obscurely about private experiences, break rules of meter and syntax, use new vocabulary, and entangle first-person speakers with their own real-life identities. Poetry thus became the most subjective genre of modern literature.On Modern Poetry reconstructs this metamorphosis, combining theoretical reflections with literary history and close readings of poets from Giacomo Leopardi to Louise Glück. Guido Mazzoni shows that the evolution of modern poetry involved significant changes in the way poetry was perceived, encouraged the construction of first-person poetic personas, and dramatically altered verse style. He interprets these developments as symptoms of profound historical and cultural shifts in the modern period: the crisis of tradition, the rise of individualism, the privileging of self-expression and its paradoxes. Mazzoni also reflects on the place of poetry in mass culture today, when its role has been largely assumed by popular music.The result is a rich history of literary modernity and a bold new account of poetry's transformations across centuries and national traditions.

Twentieth-century Italian poetry is haunted by countless ghosts and shadows from opera. Echoes of Opera in Modern Italian Poetry reveals their presence and sheds light on their role in shaping that great poetic tradition. This is the first work in English to analyze the influence of opera on modern Italian poetry, uncovering a fundamental but neglected relationship between the two art forms. A group of Italian poets, from Gabriele D'Annunzio to Giorgio Caproni, by way of Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale, made opera a cornerstone of their artistic craft. More than an occasional stylistic influence, opera is rather analyzed as a fundamental facet of these poets'intellectual quest to overcome the expressive limitations of lyrical poetry. This book reframes modern Italian poetry in a truly interdisciplinary perspective, broadening our understanding of its prominence within the humanities, in the twentieth century and beyond.

Contro cosa si è rivolta la poetica del rifiuto formulata tra gli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta del Novecento dalla Neoavanguardia italiana? È poi davvero corretto parlare di una poetica? Quali sono le dimensioni dell'impegno all'interno del Gruppo 63? Cosa hanno a che fare alienazione dell'individuo e guerra atomica con la poesia novissima? Sulla base di un confronto incrociato tra le opere più significative di tre protagonisti di quella stagione letteraria (Elio Pagliarani, Edoardo Sanguineti ed Adriano Spatola) il presente lavoro, attraverso una mirata analisi semiotica, cerca di fornire delle risposte a tali quesiti.

The blending of people and living machines is a central element in the futurist'reconstruction of the universe.'However, prior to the futurist break, a group of early-twentieth-century poets, later dubbed crepuscolari (crepusculars), had already begun an attack against the dominant cultural system, using their poetry as the locus in which useless little objects clashed with the traditional poetry of human greatness and stylistic perfection. The Quiet Avant-Garde draws from a number of twenty-first-century theories – vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and environmental humanities – as well as Bruno Latour's criticism of modernity to illustrate how the crepuscular movement sabotaged the modern mindset and launched the counter-discourse of the Italian avant-garde by blurring the line dividing people from'things.'This liminal poetics, at the crossroad of tradition, modernism, and the avant-garde, acted as the initiator of the ethical and environmental transition from a universe subjected to humans to human-thing co-agency. This book proposes a contemporary reading of Italian twentieth-century movements and offers a foothold for scholars outside Italian studies to access authors who are still unexplored in North American literature.

Lo studio interpreta la poesia di Montale dalla prospettiva del dono come oggetto di interesse di discipline antropologiche e filosofiche. L'analisi inizia dalla concezione triadica del dare-ricevere-ricambiare di Mauss in contrapposizione alla teoria derridiana che nega la possibilità del dono. Si tratta di un ampio sguardo su tutta la produzione poetica dell'autore per ricostruirne la nascita e lo sviluppo, nonché per rendere la specificità del suo destino. Il lavoro strutturato sull'esempio del trittico maussiano ne capovolge i contenuti e propone il rifiuto quale elemento fondante dell'intera analisi del dono. In ultima istanza, il dono appare come una categoria interpretativa della poesia che offre un'inesauribilità semantica al di là di ogni economia e di ogni costrizione sociale.