Word: d
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...parents, Ungaretti was in his twenties before World War I broke out. He wrote his first poems in the trenches of Carso, on the French border, and published Il Porto Sepolto (The Submerged Seaport) in 1916. These earliest poems, laconic and unpunctuated, implied from the beginning a break with d'Annunzio and the traditions of Italian poetry. Glauco Cambon's study of Ungaretti in the Columbia series recalled the war poems as "flashes of insight bursting through the shell of established prosodic convention to capture the immediacy of inner experience." And Ungaretti himself reflected (in an essay titled "The Mission...
WHAT Ungaretti drew from the War was the peculiar knowledge of a "disabused modern consciousness," not d'Annunzio's heroic myth of the theatrical, but rather the awareness of anonymity and other sorrows. Influenced more by Giacomo Leopardi, the great Italian poet of the nineteenth century, and by Mallarmé, than by the aesthetic exigencies of his own age, Ungaretti shared with his close friends Apollinaire and the Fauvist Braque a profound despair over history's irrationality. But Apollinaire never survived the War, and those who did were so shattered and forlorn that their only response was that...
...rigors of la poésie pure, the publication of his complete works under the title Vita d'un Uomo, and finally his unanimous election as President of the European Community of Writers in 1962 signaled a waking from the turbulence of his younger years to the task of what Glauco Cambon called "a generous asceticism." The narrative poem, "Choruses Descriptive of Dido's States of Mind," written during the Fifties, brings to Ungaretti's work the knowledge that, in Cambon's words, "Experience is the progressive exorcism of illusion...
...into the open, and now the news media and everybody's sister have pounced on it and stripped it of its power. The Movement, as a matter of fact, is the main culprit. It crippled the word by allowing it to become a public symbol of rebellion. I'd bet that if Lyndon Johnson had another year in office, he would destroy "fuck" on national television, just as he destroyed "We Shall Overcome" and "the Ballot or the Bullet...
...This is the second in a two-part series on Hugh D. Calkins '45, Fellow of the Harvard Corporation...