Crepuscolarismo

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The Crepuscolari is a literary flow , which in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century was born.

Origin of the term

Under the title Poesia crepuscolare (German: Dämmerdichtung ) appeared on 1. September 1910 in the Turin daily newspaper La Stampa , a review of the critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese to poetry of Marino Moretti , Fausto Maria Martini and Carlo Chiaves . The metaphor of twilight (Italian: crepuscolo ), used here for the first time to characterize a literary movement, alluded to the state of extinction, i.e. H. to a delicate, subdued tone that prevailed in the poems discussed - Borgese reproached the aforementioned twilight poets that apart from a vague melancholy they expressed no special feelings and basically had nothing to say. As a result, the term crepuscolare went down in literary criticism and literary history to designate a group of young poets who, although they did not form a programmatic school , were very similar in their stylistic and thematic orientation and, above all, had one thing in common, namely their strict refusal to to adopt the pompous forms of the heroic and sublime poetry of the fin de siècle .

New poetic attempts

In the same years, when an insurgent zeitgeist developed on the basis of vitalism and individualism , which tended to see the writer and intellectual as the main actor of the times and visionary creators of the future, the Crepuscolari undertook the opposite attempt to devalue the role of the poet and to see his work only as part of the larger, collective blueprints of society. Her poetic attempts were based on a complete rejection of the traditional self-image, according to which writing - as largely with the contemporaries Giosuè Carducci , Gabriele D'Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli - also and above all meant a social , civic and political commitment. Instead, they used the rather insignificant realism of Vittorio Betteloni , Lorenzo Stecchetti and others. a. and based on the early Pascoli der Myricae (1891) and D'Annunzio's Poema paradisiaco (1893). At the same time, the influence of Paul Verlaine and several other French and Belgian poets of symbolism ( Jules Laforgue , Albert Samain , Francis Jammes , Georges Rodenbach and Maurice Maeterlinck ) was evident in her direct, unadorned language and her interest in the simple things of everyday life . At the same time, they were well aware of the worn-out nature of their classic role models, to which they nevertheless remained true.

The search for the everyday

Any projection into the future was deliberately avoided by the Crepuscolari . a. from the current of futurism that followed them. Instead of glorifying the abstract forces of the world, they raised concrete everyday life in its simplest and most banal aspects to the subject of their poetry , devoid of any ornamentation and weighty traditions . In the melancholy need to confess their subjective suffering and to mourn the lost cultural values , the representatives of both the Turin group around Guido Gozzano and their Roman counterpart around Sergio Corazzini agreed. Their never-ending dissatisfaction was not expressed in turmoil , but in the search for the quiet corners of the world, the known havens of the soul .

Subjects of poetry

As one of the first representatives of the current and contributor in the Roman group, Corrado Govoni enumerated the most important topics of crepuscolarismo in a letter to his friend Gian Pietro Lucini in 1904 : "The sad things, the traveling music , love songs sung by the ancients in restaurants , the prayers of religious sisters , picturesque, ragged, sick beggars , convalescents , melancholy autumns full of farewells , the almost fearful spring in boarding school , magnetic fields, churches in which the candles weep unmoved, peeling roses in the little altar niches of the deserted streets on which the grass grows ... "

The language of the Crepuscolari

The linguistic form of the so-called “twilight poetry” also corresponded to this disillusioning content, because the Crepuscolari tended to shorten their lyric poetry to prose : They formed verses that maintained a poetic rhythm , but broke with conventional metrics and therefore rather with unbound speech are to be assigned. Their desire for a sober, prosaic language without any courtly or classical forms meant that the verso libero could fully assert itself.

Representative

swell

  1. ↑ cf. Borgese, GA: "Poesia crepuscolare" In: La Stampa (September 1, 1910)
  2. ↑ quoted in http://studi-italiani.fltr.ucl.ac.be/etudes/notes/exercices/explication/quarta/primonove.htm ( memento of September 24, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) , date of access: 25. May 2007: “Le cose tristi, la musica girovaga, i canti d'amore cantati dai vecchi nelle osterie, le preghiere delle suore, i mendicanti pittorescamente stracciati e malati, i convalescenti, gli autunni melanconici pieni di addii, colle le primavere n timorose, le campagne magnetiche, le chiese dove piangono indifferentemente i ceri, le rose che si sfogliano su gli altarini nei canti delle vie deserte in cui cresce l'erba… "

literature

  • Sanguineti, Edoardo: Tra liberty e crepuscolarismo . 1961
  • Livi, François: Tra crepuscolarismo e futurismo. Govoni e Palazzeschi . Milan: Istituto propaganda libraria, 1980
  • Marinari, Dora: Gozzano ei poeti "crepuscolari" . Rome: Bonacci, 1985
  • Livi, François: La parola crepuscolare. Corazzini, Gozzano, Moretti . Milan: Istituto propaganda libraria, 1986
  • Quatela, Antonio: Invito a conoscere il crepuscolarismo . Milan: Mursia, 1988
  • Savoca, Giuseppe / Tropea, Mario: Pascoli, Gozzano ei crepuscolari . Rome: Laterza, 1988
  • Grisi, Francesco: I crepuscolari. Da Gozzano a Palazzeschi, da Govoni a Oxilia, da Corazzini a Moretti . Rome: Newton Compton, 1990
  • Aymone, Renato: Circostanze crepuscolari . Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1991
  • Villa, Angela Ida: Neoidealismo e rinascenza latina tra Otto e Novecento. La cerchia di Sergio Corazzini. Poeti dimenticati e riviste del Crepuscolarismo romano (1903-1907) . Milan: LED, 1999
  • Fantasia, Rita: Poesia e rivoluzione. Simbolismo, crepuscolarismo, futurismo . Milan: Angeli, 2004

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