Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...look back to the war in Vietnam as a basic source of unhappiness and concern...
...drifting through Harvard Square, and talking far into the night about his life and of the age. Last Friday night he gave the first of two readings scheduled at Harvard, and brought to the small audience in Burr B a final sense of what poetry had been before the War: defiant, vociferous, marked by a refusal to acknowledge even the voice's limitations. Andrew Wylie read from his own translations, and Ungaretti followed each poem in Italian. Reciting "Tu Ti Spezzasti" ("You Shattered"), a lament on the death of his son at sea, he shuddered through each enjambing line, whispered...
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1888, of Italian 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...
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...
Ungaretti survived both the War and many of his friends, and took up, on his own, a more gentle intransigence, the work of creative revolution which he and Appollinaire, among others, had begun in the Paris Academies before the War. The rage which warped so many artists in the years between two wars, verging on insanity and spilling into the excesses of Futurism, was a condition he avoided; Ungaretti took stylistic refuge in the Neo-Symbolist movement of "Hermetic" poetry, in an obscurantism that usually meant praise more than polemic...