ANDREW FRISARDI 79 in an immensity of spaces." When Ungaretti refers to himself as "Ungaretti, man of pain," uomo di pena, the directness does not move us because of one individual's suffering. Rather, an ordinary soldier's oblique identification with Christ, the universal man, consecrates the massive suffering and death that war inflict
Uomo di pena - not the personal voice but the universal experience.
s purified. Not only did he lack the time to second-guess the amazing phrases that he jotted down as they came into his head, but he had every reason to believe that no one would ever read them. He was no more likely to survive the almost daily battles on the Austrian front than the friend he wrote about in "Vigil," which I
Vigil - antithesis and oxymoron as dominant in his work.
ers by his moral seriousness and philosophical
Key differences between L'Allegria and Zang Tumb Tumb
relevance for Ungaretti was his proposal of a new poetic language of parole en liberte, joined in "ever deeper and distant analogical associat
Literature as analogous - reader makes connection through words - personal associations rather than personal voice?
i." For Ungaretti, this meant that the naked flashes of insight that characterized the poems of his first book needed to be filled out and grounded by the memory of history. Another way to say this is that Ungaretti now felt a need to substantialize further his poetic langu
His own personal memory needs to be substantiated.
Hermetic poetry was a poetry that sought, not to describe or represent, but to
Hermetic poetry - similar to Marinetti's intention?
romanticism of Carducci, the sentimental decadence of Pascoli, and the bombastic decadence of D'Annunzio
Setting himself against other poets in my list. Carducci and Pascoli romanticists, meaning they focused on the personal voice of the author where Ungaretti seemingly focuses on a depersonalisation and universalism of his experience.
ruin." I was struck when I first read this, by the implied reference to Ungaretti's experience in the war, documented in the following early poem about watching the sun rise over the aftermath of a battlefield: Suddenly the lucid awesome vastness
In later years there is a "lucid awesome vastness" - a sense of the bigger picture.
ntury Italy. Rebay shows that Ungaretti believed passionately in a political system that would be "for the people" and thought that fascism was the system that could best accomplish this, bringing about "a social order capable of guaranteeing dignified work for all in accordance with their aptitudes and talents, regard
Links to Pascoli and the desire to overcome class boundaries.
Ungaretti was patriotic, but he was too cosmopolitan and tolerant to be narrowly nation
Does this explain the lack of patriotic pride and the refusal to see war as a duty? Links to Moammed Scaeb and his identity crisis.
Ungaretti's passionate attachment to Italy and his Italian roots also led him to believe in Mussolini and Italian fascism.
Interesting that his patriotism doesn't lead him to nationalistic pride in war as it does with other poets.
as if he felt that breaking the semantic threads of grammar would clear the way for a renewed sense of meaning in his doubting heart and mind.
Influence of Futurism: war on linguistic structures to express exuberance vs halting doubt.
One part of the collection IlDolore (Suffering, 1947), in which the above poem was published, is set in Rome during World War II: a cradle of Western civilization in the throes of violence and chaos. Ungaretti despairs over the breakdown of culture and humanitarian values but ultimately affirms the power of creative human endeavor to survive the darker forces that always threaten it.
It would appear that Ungaretti became more hopeful, either because he had already survived one world war or perhaps because he was not directly participating as a soldier.
For Ungaretti, poetry is a means for using memory, the collective memory that language embodies, to rediscover innocence, "the world resurrected in its native purity." Th
Writing about these experiences as a purification.
w: "The image of desolation has been an obsession for me since my first poems. To be precise, the desert was in me: from it was born . . . the motion and the feeling of infinity, of the primordial, of the decline into nothingnes
There is a fulness of life but an emptiness of meaning? War like the desert that signifies much but ultimately serves no purpose.