Italy Literature – Developments of the Early Romanticism Part 3
The nature of the arguments, some figures of perennial humanity (but Porta has much more profound ones) and the rapidly becoming general consensus on the Manzonian concept of language, usually exclude Giuseppe Giusti from the dialectal poets; but a dialect poet he is for the pretta toscanità not only of language and matter, but of allusions, of costume, of spirit, in those of his Scherzi , which when they do not weigh them down artificial superstructures, gush, gush, bubble out of a fantasy very agile in which a free, honest, courageous soul is formed at our sight. These observations on Giusti show how inconsistent and artificial and arbitrary the category of dialectal poets is; so much so that we will not ascribe to it, for example, Tommaso Grossi for his Fugitive , which although written in dialect represents or simulates a world of sentimentality alien to the nature of the Ambrosian people. But Grossi was second with the Fugitive , with Ildegonda and with Ulrico and Lida (the one translated, these originally written in Italian) the tastes of the time, to which the novel narrator of pathetic stories suited herself. And this genre had numerous followers: in Lombardy with Cantù, with Giovanni Torti, with Pellico; in Tuscany with Bartolomeo Sestini; in Calabria, where short stories and poems of inspiration between grossiana and byroniana wrote Domenico Mauro, Giuseppe Campagna, Vincenzo Padula and more others. Niccolò Tommaseo, a strong and versatile genius, also treated with greater vigor the story in verse, historical and psychological, that the doctrines and the practice of romanticism tempered and supported with a well digested set of classical culture also in his countless other works of art. and literary criticism, history and politics, philosophy and philology, pedagogy and morals. Miranda del Fogazzaro.
Transplanted in Italy from German literature, Giovanni Berchet hopes, the ballad or epic-lyric romance had great success in Italy and varied developments also due to the intertwining of the new import with the old tradition of the song. From Pietro Paolo Parzanese, a cantor in a studied modest form of the miseries and pains of the pious villager multitude, to Arnaldo Fusinato, easy verse in the pathetic and the playful, both sometimes inspired also by love of country; from Luigi Carrer, an elegant exhibitor of Italian and exotic legends and a good prose writer and poet in various genres, to Giacomo Zanella, a fine engraver of images in the poetic treatment of human, scientific, religious, family ideals,
Among all, and deservedly, Giovanni Prati and Aleardo Aleardi, masters and leaders of what was called the second romanticism, had a wider and more lasting fame. Prati, a soul open to every impression and nourished by German, English, French culture, sang with inexhaustible vein, but not always with intensity and clarity of fantastic vision, the most varied topics: history, legends, politics, religion, daily life, nature, in lyrics and poems and poems of various meters, easy, harmonious, playful with fresh breaths of poetry, but not immune from emptiness, from sloppiness, from affectation, from obscurity. A poet of the most intense to imagine, Aleardi is a hendecasyllable smith with an almost Foscolian temperament, and sings history and prehistory, nature and human problems, with romantic audacity and classical composure,
According to Topmbadirectory, hearts devoted to the national idea, both Prati and Aleardi belong to the category of patriotic lyrics, among which Manzoni, Leopardi, Niccolini can also be included; but true popularity and more immediate effectiveness in the great work of the Risorgimento had other poets easier, more impetuous, hotter and in the lesser perfection of the art better proportioned to the intelligence of the people: Giovanni Berchet, who was the first to concretize in the melancholy sweetness of the maid intimacy the poetry of the homeland crystallized earlier in the abstractness of words that literature had emptied of meaning; Gabriele Rossetti, who was the poet of the Neapolitan revolution of 1820; Pietro Giannone, romantic enhancer of pathos conspiracies; Alessandro Poerio, Goffredo Mameli, Luigi Mercantini, the author of the hymn of Garibaldi. To whom, representatives of a literature that was an ardent forge of war against the foreigner, can be accompanied Silvio Pellico, poet, in the prose of My prisons , of a Christian resignation that had in itself the leaven of rebellion, and Vincenzo Gioberti, apostle of the neo-Guelph idea in his moral and civil primacy of the Italians , which deserves to be remembered also literary for the merits of fervent eloquence.
Having fallen in 1849 the illusions that the revolutions and the war of the previous year had created, and thus exhausted the political office that literature had previously fulfilled, romanticism, born with spirits of rebellion at every academy, ended up degenerating into a new academy: the artistic re-enactments of the past already been an omen and auspice of the future, became sterile in vain school memories; the affectionate sentimental delinquencies and the affected melancholies became ostentatious habits; the image faded into vaporous ghosts and soft harmonies, while a slovenly carelessness dominated in the structure of the structures and style, which was excused for spontaneity of inspiration. With this slackness of feeling, thinking and imagining, characteristic of the second romanticism also in its corypheas, tried to react in the years between 1860 and 80 the so-called Milanese scapigliatura, that is a group of writers (Giuseppe Rovani, Emilio Praga, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, Arrigo Boito, Carlo Righetti aka Cletto Arrighi, Alberto Pisani Dossi), who profoundly different among them by temperament and by vigor of imagination (Boito stands tall above all, whose glory as a musician obscured his fame as a singular poet), were united by the intention of contrasting the representation of truth with evanescent images, the ardor of passion for swooning sentimentality and lovingly paid attention to contemporary foreign literature, especially in the French style. But a more vigorous and more effective reaction came, in the name of classicism, from a group of young Tuscan people (the pedantic friends: Giuseppe Chiarini, Torquato Gargani, etc.), from which he emerged.