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POETRY

Writing, They Offer You a Dear Rose...Themselves.

IN THIS PAGE I WANT TO PAY HOMAGE TO A POET WHO PEOPLE

DON'T SEEM TO KNOW OR TO APPRECIATE :

GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI

Ungaretti was one of the poets who grew up at the very beginning of this century, he was born in 1888 in Aegypt, in Alessandria d'Egitto; his parents were from Lucca but moved in Aegypt for working. There he lived his youth, to move on later to Paris, at that time the worldwide capital of Arts where he met some of the most genial and famous artists of the time. In 1915 he was in Italy, so he had to face the First World War in the ranks of the Italian Army. He experienced the war from its real inside, from the ditches, right in the middle of the battles, running trough explosions, shots and fighting with cold steel...And from the horrible experiences he was getting he started writing his first poems which ended up later in his first collection of poetry whose name was "Il Porto Sepolto", in which were clear the inner upsetting, the deep commotion and refusal the war provoked in him. From a certain point of view that work is considered his best one, and this can let us think that somehow it's sad to realize how the best things in life of a man ususally are born in the worst times of a man's life...Sure they're free, though they cost us our own share of tragedy. His second poetical collection was published in 1919, whose title was "Allegria di naufragi", which had the same basilar characterizations of the former one. His following work was, in 1933, "Sentimento del Tempo", where we can find a mutation in the mainlines of Ungaretti's poetry. Indeed, we can see how the main thing, the center and heart of his early poems was the pure and simple Word, that was isolated, standing-alone in the sheets of the books, and the blank all around it underlined its preminent role, its unique power: that's what the crtics use to call "The Dried Word", that is, the word freed of anything but its own sound and its deepest and most original meaning, its inner power, its rythm. In "Sentimento del Tempo" instead we encounter the comeback of the sentence, of the versed composed of several words, where we can recognize the tentative of the poet to build up his own metrics and images, because in the first period he got rid of the old and retorical ones. He had also to do this because in that collection the themes developped are harder, even more painful, but also more "ethereal", like Death, Time itself in their own conception. The form got more complex, with the recover of the glorious Hendecasyllable. In 1936 Ungaretti went to Brazil, where he taught Italian Literature in the university of San Paolo, but in 1939 a tragedy hit him, his 9-year-old son, Antonietto, died, and this grevious fact influenced "Il Dolore", the collection published in 1947 in Italy, where he had come back in 1942 to teach in the University of Rome Italian and also Modern Literature. Naturally, in "Il Dolore" the Second world War plays an important role, due to its lacerating and distressing burden. The sense of Anxiety pervades those poems. In 1950 "La terra promessa" was published, in 1952 "Un grido e paesaggi", in 1960 "Il taccuino del Vecchio", fundamental legs of the third period of Ungaretti's poetry that had begun with "Il dolore": Meditation, that is the keyword for explaining this final phase, Meditation in his style, now cristalized in forms Ungaretti considered just as most perfect, pure as possible, learned from his own past experiences but enherited from three masters of past Italian poetry, Petrarca, Tasso and Foscolo too, Meditation in the themes, now Ungaretti seems to look at his life, and generally,at the world with the somehow melancolic somehow ironic wisdom of the "Grown-ups". In 1966 was published "Vita d'un uomo" in which he put together all his poetic production...A man's life is all he wanted to give to the readers and every other man.

Giuseppe Ungaretti died in 1970.

IF YOU WANT TO READ SOME OF HIS POEMS,

HERE YOU HAVE SEVERAL FROM HIS FIRST COLLECTION.

BUT, IN THE END, WHAT IS POETRY?

"THIS IS ALL I NEED TO KNOW, NOT TO LIVE IN VAIN..."

JUST LOOK HOW A SIMPLE, MODEST, MEEK COMMA CAN CHANGE, CAN TURN UPSIDE DOWN A WHOLE SENTENCE,

AN ENTIRE VERSE,

"THIS IS ALL I NEED TO KNOW NOT, TO LIVE IN VAIN..."

WELL, THAT SHOWS WHAT POETRY IS...ON WORDS IT PLAYS TO PUT EVERYONE ASUNDER...TO LET YOU THINK ABOUT THE THIN, QUITE INVISIBILE BORDER BETWEEN THE THINGS YOU SAY AND THE THINGS YOU MEAN, I AM SURE YOU HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED THAT OF TWO WERE ONE, BUT INDEED POETRY IS THERE TO UNDERLINE THE DECEPTIVE VANITY OF YOUR WHISPERINGS...THE ANCIENT LATINS USED TO SAY:

"VERBA VOLANT, SCRIPTA MANENT"

AND THAT'S IT. WORDS FLY THROUGH THE AIR, SLOUCH

TO REACH FOR YOUR EARS, AND THEN...DISAPPEAR!

SENTENCES WRITTEN INSTEAD DON'T CRAWL TO YOU, THEY SLING OVER THE PAGES OF BOOKS, AND WAIT,

WAIT FOR YOU TO COME!

WHILE OFTEN YOU HEAR ALSO WHEN YOU DON'T WANT TO,

YOU READ ONLY WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE TO,

AND POETRY TAKES ADVANTAGE OF THIS TOO.

DOES POETRY SLIT? DOES POETRY SLOG?

CAN YOU SMART WITH POETRY?

I AM NOT GOING TO TELL YOU, BECAUSE THERE ARE THINGS THAT TOLD OR SAID CANNOT BE,

ME OR YOU OR WHOEVER, WE SHALL JUST STRUGGLE