Sergio Corazzini
Sergio Corazzini was an influential Italian poet born on February 6, 1886, in Rome, known for his role in the crepuscolarismo movement, which emerged in Italy during the early 1900s. His life was marked by personal struggles, including his family's financial difficulties and his own battle with tuberculosis, which ultimately led to his untimely death at the age of twenty-one on June 17, 1907. Despite his brief life, Corazzini published several volumes of poetry, earning a reputation for his poignant reflections on disillusionment and melancholy, themes often expressed through imagery of twilight and forgotten places.
His poetry, written in the Roman dialect known as romanesco, drew inspiration from both French Symbolism and Christian themes, evidenced in works like "L'amaro calice." His early collections include "Dolcezze," featuring seventeen selected poems. After his death, many of his works were collected and published posthumously, leading to a resurgence of interest in his writings. Scholarly studies about Corazzini have been published over the years, and his complete works were finally compiled in 1968. In recent years, translations by Michael Palma have introduced Corazzini's poetry to a wider English-speaking audience, highlighting his continued relevance in the literary world.
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Sergio Corazzini
Writer
- Born: February 6, 1886
- Birthplace: Rome, Italy
- Died: June 17, 1907
Biography
Most famous for his part in crepuscolarismo (the “crepuscular” literary movement in Italian poetry at the turn of the twentieth century), Sergio Corazzini was born on February 6, 1886, in Rome. While attending secondary school, he was forced to withdraw due to his family’s financial circumstances caused by parents’ sickness. However, after beginning employment with an insurance company, Corazzini himself developed tuberculosis. After visiting a sanatorium in Nettuno in an attempt to recover, Corazzini returned to Rome and died at the age of twenty-one, on June 17, 1907. Working against time, however, he had managed to publish several volumes of poetry before his death, contributing to a semi-Byronic reputation as a gifted poet dying much too soon. This reputation was further embellished by a fictional account of Corazzini and his friends, the novel Si sbarca a New York (Landing in New York), written by his friend Fausto M. Martini.
Crepuscolarismo, or the “twilight school,” rose in Italy in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and is usually associated with Corazzini, Corrado Govoni, Eugenio Montale, and others. The disillusionment and general melancholy of this school is often represented within its poetry by twilight, the time of fading light, and depictions of obscure or forgotten places and things. Corazzini published several of these poems in Italian journals before selecting seventeen of them for his first collection, Dolcezze (sweetnesses). All of these poems were written in romanesco, the Roman dialect Corazzini championed in his beginning work, and were fashioned somewhat after the style of the French Symbolist poets.
Although Corazzini was often satirical of the Italian Catholic Church, he drew much inspiration and imagery from Christianity and specific biblical passages; this tendency was especially evident in L’amaro calice (the bitter cup), also published in 1904. Other volumes followed, as well as a play, Il traguardo (the goal, performed in May, 1905, in Rome), Corazzini’s only venture into this genre. His last book of poetry published during his lifetime appeared in December, 1906, six months before his death. His friends collected many of his poems and published them posthumously as Liriche in 1908; however, much of Corazzini’s work remained uncollected.
Finally, in 1968, Corazzini’s entire corpus was released with Poesie edite e inedite (published and unpublished poems). A book-length study of Corazzini, Vita e poesia di Sergio Corazzini by Filippo Donini, had already appeared (1949), and a dissertation in French by Guy Allanic, La Vie et l’œuvre du poéte Sergio Corazzini, was published in 1973. Another study, Concordanza delle poesie di Sergio Corazzini by Giuseppe Savoca, came out in 1987, and recently several of Corazzini’s works have gained attention in the English-reading world after being translated by Italian American poet Michael Palma.