Poetry of Carducci by Giosuè Carducci

First published: 1857-1899; includes Rime, 1857; Levia gravia, 1868; Odi barbare, 1877 (Barbarian Odes, 1939, rev. 1950); Nuove odi barbare, 1882 (New Barbarian Odes, 1939, rev. 1950); Terze odi barbare, 1889 (Third Barbarian Odes, 1939, rev. 1950); Rime e ritmi, 1899 (Lyrics and Rhythms, 1942)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Rarely has a poet in modern times been awarded the admiration and adulation that Italians accorded to Giosuè Carducci during his lifetime. Regarded as a national prophet as well as the unofficial poet laureate of Italy, he was something of an Italian institution. In addition to his career as poet and essayist, he was a highly successful academic. Although derided in his time by some groups, he served as a professor of literature at the University of Bologna for more than forty years. In 1906, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the earliest recipients of the prize.

For most of his career, Carducci was, until converting to monarchism, a nonconformist, a republican supporter of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini during the unification wars. As a poet, he was an outspoken anti-Romantic and an anticleric. These stances contributed to his popularity in Italy. His importance in the history of Italian literature rests on the quantity and quality of his neoclassical poetry, which is rife with references to Roman glory, and a vocabulary to match. When he began his career in the middle of the nineteenth century, Romanticism was in full flower and entering its decadent phase. Carducci’s neoclassical poems represent a different poetic, one addressing political topics and advocating political vigor for the Italians engaged in the unification movement—poetry that stressed the greatness of Rome over the theocratic Roman Catholicism of medieval Italy.

Carducci fervently believed that his, if not all, poetry should be an effective instrument in the great awakening—political, religious, and literary—that was taking place in Italy against the papacy and foreign occupiers. Carducci was dogmatically convinced that his neoclassical verses, vocabulary, and references would revitalize Italian poetry and put it back on the right and true track furnished by its Romano-classical ancestry. Literary history has proven his program misguided. His purely neoclassical poems are restrained, controlled, and intellectual. The bulk of his poetry is too often occasional, polemic, sententious, or tied to places and bygone people and events—factors that account for his poetry lacking a high readership today. Many readers dislike Carducci’s grandiloquence, but his Romantic poetry is often exquisite.

Carducci continued writing in the spirit of the neoclassical movement that was initiated by J. J. Winckelmann and his groundbreaking Gedanken über die Nachamung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1775; Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, 1987). Winckelmann wrote this work after he discovered, as a librarian in Rome, what he assumed were Greek works of art. Carducci, however, chose ancient Rome, and not the Greeks, as his model. To modern readers, his neoclassical poetry rings stentorian and lacks, to compare it with another art form by neoclassical artists, the grace and charm of the neo-Greek statuary of fellow Italian Antonio Canova. Nevertheless, Carducci outshone his contemporaries and was, in the absence of other signal poets, the major Italian poet of the nineteenth century; he was a successor to the greats Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi and a precursor to Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Carducci’s second published poem is the still-famous “Hymn to Satan” (1857). It shocked Italy and reaped outcries of blasphemy from his continual enemy, the Catholic Church. The poem ascribes, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did half a century earlier in his Faust: Ein Fragment (1790; Faust: A Fragment, 1980), creative and constructive power to the revolutionary, fallen fourth archangel and invokes Satan as other poems had invoked the Muses. In the hymn, Carducci complains that Christianity is moribund and is carrying the world to destruction. He invokes paganism as a means of freeing the human mind. Satan in the poem is presented as a spirit of paganism, the spirit that evoked the sculpture, the pictures, and the literature of classical antiquity. Thus, Satan becomes for Carducci a helper, not an adversary, of humanity and humanism, a symbol of progress, intellectuality, anticlericalism, and a positive influence on classical thought.

When not slavishly adhering to Roman locales and models, to abstruse vocabulary, or to the lambasting of other Romantic poets, Carducci wrote some first-rate poetry, ironically, mostly poems on romantic love and nature. Among these are “The Song of Love,” which ends, antithetically, with heartfelt sympathy for the pontiff; “The Sonnet,” an homage to the poetic form invented by a thirteenth century Italian poet; and “Crossing the Tuscan Marshland,” a strong paean to the vigorous people of the region in which Carducci grew up. Others includes “Classical Spring” and “Romantic Autumn,” two poems highlighting Carducci’s dialectical nature as poet; “Ancient Lament,” an exquisitely elegiac nature poem bemoaning the loss of his youngest son; “St. Martin,” aurally musical in its original Italian; “Classicism and Romanticism,” which lauds the work that goes into a poem of neoclassical tenor and savagely disparages the poetry of the Romantics; “Congedo,” a self-justifying poem, but not a cloying one; “Commemoration of the Founding of Rome,” an accessible example of his Rome-inspired poetry; “Tuscan Hills,” a fine example of an occasional poem, the wedding of one of Carducci’s daughters; and “Alpine Noon,” an exquisite nature poem, set in one of the few landscapes outside the poet’s native central Italy.

Another poem, “At the Station on an Autumn Morning,” is classical in strophic form and early modern in content. It is an elegy on the departure of one of Carducci’s mistresses from the train station in Bologna, one of the first times a railroad train, depicted as modern monster, figures in a poem. It displays an impressive onomatopoeia of railway workers striking hotboxes, punching tickets, and shutting compartment doors.

Although a cliché, it is especially true that what gets lost when translated into English is Carducci’s particular poetic voice. English tends to flatten Carducci’s exalted vocabulary, his celebratory Italian. This in part explains why his work is not known by a large number of anglophone readers. The poems cited above, however, warrant reading in translation, ideally as a bridge to the reward of reading them in Italian.

Bibliography

Arapaia, Paul. “Constructing a National Identity from a Created Literary Past: Giosuè Carducci and the Development of a National Literature.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer, 2002): 192-214. Explains how Carducci created a literary history to construct a cultural identity and a sense of political mission for the emerging Italian nation.

Barricelli, Jean-Paul. “Giosuè Carducci.” In European Authors: 1000-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of European Literature, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Vineta Colby. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1967. Describes Carducci’s life and works. Part of a general collection of biographical essays on European writers active through the nineteenth century. Includes a bibliography.

Carducci, Giosuè. Selected Verse. Edited with a translation, introduction, and commentary by David H. Higgins. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1994. Collection of fifty-two poems, including “Hymn to Satan,” published in Italian with English translations on the facing pages. Includes one of the best critical introductions in English to Carducci and his poetry.

Davis, J. Madison. “Giosuè Carducci.” In Critical Survey of Poetry, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. 4th ed. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2011. An expansive discussion of Carducci and his work. Recommended as a good starting place for students new to his work.

Dombroski, Robert. “Carducci and Classicism.” In The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, edited by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Though brief, this essay addresses the question of Carducci’s neoclassicism versus his Romanticism.