Life of a Man

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Life of a Man

THE LITERARY WORK

A poetic corpus set in twentieth-century Italy; published in Italian (as Vita d’un uomo) from 1916-1970, in English in part beginning in 1958.

SYNOPSIS

Conceived as a diary of Ungarett’s inner life, the corpus consists of separate poetic collections that reflect spiritual transformations.

Events in History at the Time of the Poems

The Poems in Focus

For More Information

Giuseppe Ungaretti was born February 8, 1888, in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian immigrant parents. Surprisingly, in light of his future role as founder of modern Italian poetry, he was educated in French and did not travel to his parents’ homeland until 1912, when he passed through on his way to Paris to study. In Paris he attended lectures by the French philosopher Henri Bergson and met the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, the French poet Max Jacob, and Italy’s Futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Artist-critic Ardengo Soffici invited Ungaretti to contribute to the new journal Lacerba, in which his first poems were published in 1915. Ungaretti returned to Italy at the onset of World War I, serving as a soldier on the Carso plateau from 1915 to 1918 and composing 33 poems that became the core of his first collection The Joy of Shipwrecks (partially published in 1916, updated and republished in 1921 and, as Joy, in 1931). He married Jeanne Dupoix and in 1921 moved to Rome, where he accepted a post in the French Press division of the foreign ministry, which he held until 1936. During these 15 years, he traveled as a newspaper correspondent, wrote articles, translated literary works, lectured on Italian literature, and produced his second book of poetry—A Sense of Time (1933). For the next half dozen years (1936-42), Ungaretti taught Italian literature at the University of Sāo Paulo, Brazil. Forced to return to Italy when Brazil entered World War II on the side of the Allies, he was offered a post at the University of Rome. In the wake of the war, Ungaretti published Affliction (1950), in which he mourned the deaths of his elder brother and nine-year-old son as well as Italy’s losses in the internal struggle between Resistance fighters and Fascists (1943-45). More poetic collections followed: The Promised Land (1950), A Cry and Landscapes (1952), and The Old Man’s Notebook (1960), which with Poesie disperse, or Lost Poems (1945), and some later poems, completes the corpus that would become Life of a Man. From its inception, Ungaretti conceived it as a sustained meditation on death, that is, on the moral strength it reveals, which alone can with-stand the contradiction between metaphysical despair and sensual innocence. It was Ungaretti’s ability to evoke this moral strength in the fleeting poetic word that for a whole generation made his name synonymous with poetry itself.

Events in History at the Time of the Poems

Modernity and avant-garde revolution

Italian futurism, launched in 1909 from Paris by Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times), quickly spread throughout Europe its call for artists to bury the past and celebrate experimentation, technological innovation, and the vast crowds of the modern city. The movement was reacting in part to Italy’s perceived failure to produce an artistic rebirth to mirror its political unification during the wars of the Risorgimento (1859), or “reunification,” which resulted in its becoming a unified political power for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. Futurism stepped in to effect a concomitant artistic rebirth, responding at the same time to a broader crisis over the role of the modern artist in Western capitalist societies. All over Europe, artists argued that modernity was not the shallow, materialistic “progress” championed by the bourgeoisie, but a revolutionary, anarchic force that would break down class divisions and social conventions. Indeed, the flourishing of “isms” in art at the time—from cubism and surrealism in France, to expressionism in Germany, and imagism in Great Britain—reflected the frenetic desire to create not only a new artistic form but also a new society that would validate it.

In Italy in particular, the younger generation sought to escape a heritage embodied in the flamboyant writing of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938), who achieved international success, it was said, by pandering to the bourgeois, though he also infused Italian verse with a renewed sensual fullness and a prescient sense of modernity’s spiritual abyss (see D’Annunzio’s Child of Pleasure , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). First the so-called crepuscular poets, with their ironic, subdued, everyday style, and then the Futurists, with their attack on all conventions, rejected the pessimistic view that, in his bombast and anguish, D’Annunzio signaled the final expulsion of art from modern industrial and scientific societies. There was, as Ungaretti later averred, much merit in the Futurists’ call for a drastic change, especially their call for expressive forms to mirror an increasingly fragmented, chaotic, decentered world. Like the French avantgarde, the Futurists opposed naturalistic representation. They sought instead dynamic art forms to impose upon their audience some contemporary realities: the quintessentially modern phenomenon of impersonal violence; the awareness of distant experiences; and the loss of linear time as a result of increasing speed. Artists gave expression to these ideas in the Futurist serata (evening), a public performance including the display of paintings, the use of Intonarumori (machines built by the Futurists to make musical noise) or perhaps the blaring of avant-garde music, poetry recitations, harangues against the past and the political establishment, and mutual pelting of audience and performers with rotten fruit. Though Ungaretti never adhered to a particular avant-garde or Futurist group, he was shaped by their debates and drew from them a lifelong pre-occupation with the conflict between individual freedom, on one hand, and the desire for new mythologies to heal modern alienation, on the other hand. Individual freedom for Ungaretti entailed both creative and existential freedom, that is, the freedom to question and perhaps not to find the ultimate meaning of life and death.

Overwhelmingly the avant-garde artists, Ungaretti among them, favored Italy’s intervention in World War I: the war, for many, represented the final breakdown of traditional society, paving the way for a new world in which Italy would reinvent both art and the individual. More specifically, for the pro-war newspaper II Popolo d’Italia (1914-43; The Italian People), founded by Benito Mussolini, the war would empower “the people” both politically and culturally—a claim to which Ungaretti, proud of his working-class origins, was very susceptible.

Mass death, estrangement, and mourning

For the Italians and for Europe in general, World War 1 turned out to be far more disruptive than anyone could have imagined. Individually the unprecedented number of deaths brought new and lasting psychological traumas. Socially the solidarity experienced on the battlefield seemed to disintegrate in postwar Italy in the face of partisan politics and a return to prewar social divisions.

The social divisions coalesced around at least three issues. The first issue was the result of the failure to deliver on a promise. At the height of the war the government pledged that soldiers would afterwards experience greater social justice and specifically new land allocations, which did not materialize. This led to the recurrent image of the victimized “peasant-soldier” who, deprived of land, could not fulfill his mission of re-fertilizing Italy, literally and spiritually. Second, Italy’s defeat at Caporetto (October 24, 1917), a crushing military humiliation, led to almost as crushing an argument about who was to blame: while the head of Italy’s military forces, Luigi Cadorna, was punitively replaced by Armando Diaz, the military simultaneously condemned ordinary soldiers for too often showing a lack of courage and deserting. Three years into peacetime, an investigative commission on Caporetto was still trying to exonerate those who had been unjustly shot as traitors. The third issue contributing to social disunity concerned the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919), which, in the opinion of many Italians, gave credence only to a “mutilated victory” (as the popular expression went), since it did not award Italy control over the Austrian territories in Dalmatia (once controlled by Venice, Italy), or of the city of Fiume (formerly controlled by Italy). These areas had been at the center of the wartime campaign and in the postwar era would inspire bitter attacks against the liberal government, which was seen as having “betrayed” the territories’ Italian populations. As one government after another fell in postwar Italy, Mussolini gained popularity, particularly with intellectuals and artists, largely because he promised to heal these rifts and (through an antibourgeois revolution) to restore Italy’s territorial unity.

In addressing wartime trauma Mussolini’s only rival was Gabriele D’Annunzio, who had also been vocal in interventionism and who, like Mussolini, returned from the war as a multi-decorated, wounded hero. In his postwar speeches, as well as in his main literary work of this period (Nocturne, partially published, 1916; final version, 1921), D’Annunzio’s regard for the process of commemoration reflects his intuition that some ritual was necessary to facilitate the psychological reintegration of men whose worldviews had been shattered. Soldiers’ “identification” with “the death of every comrade” needed expression (Leed, p. 211). D’Annunzio conjured an image of the northern front on the bare, rocky, pockmarked Carso Mountains as a type of hell. Meanwhile, French poet Andre Breton, whose own writings concentrated in part on mental disorders and dreams, was using free association to help psychiatric patients voice their experience of an alienation so radical no language or paradigm could contain it. Ungaretti would later reinvent D’Annunzio’s image, portraying himself as a barren Carsic rock (Ungaretti, A Major Selection, p. 69). Also he later conceived poetry born from feelings of alienation that resembled those of Breton:

A spell has been broken; men no longer have anything in common, except their delirious suffering, and even that separates and wounds them. … Who is still capable of knowing what art is, what life is, who is capable of introspection without experiencing the terror of yet another disappointment … ?
(Ungaretti, Correspondance, p. 12)

Much of D’Annunzio’s popularity came from asserting the primacy of the war experience over any distinction between Fascism and anti-Fascism. The stands the poet took on issues after the war, particularly his physical takeover of Fiume (1919-20), with the help of a band of irregulars, reflect a blurring of boundaries among the artistic, political, social, and religious spheres. This blurring occurred within the poetry, fiction, and political speeches he and others wrote: to give expression to collective mourning was at once a religious, highly individualistic act and a representative political act. A young poet at the time, Ungaretti would produce works (The Buried Harbor [1916] and its expansion The Joy of Shipwrecks [1919]) that provided an alternative rhetoric of mourning, which reacted to and borrowed from D’Annunzio, meanwhile helping modern Italian poetry supersede D’Annunzio’s perspective.

Fascism and its rewritings

By 1922 disaffection and political instability were so great in Italy that Mussolini could organize a march on Rome by 30,000 Fascists (October 28) and thereby force the hand of King Victor Emmanuel. The king offered Mussolini the post of prime minister and the task of forming a government of national unity, both of which the future dictator accepted. Generally speaking, the rise to power of Fascism was accompanied by a growing desire for a return to order after the agitation and experimentation that had purportedly led to the First World War and continued thereafter. This desire for order reverberated in art, where the influential literary journal La Ronda (The Circle), in which Ungaretti published, championed the Italian classics as well as socially unengaged writing—writing as “pure style” separate from societal involvement. The return to order set the stage for Fascism’s transformation into an ideology of permanent revolution, featuring a rhetoric of violence that gave vent to emotions but ultimately suppressed the possibility of any real change. Artists were encouraged to develop revolutionary aesthetics so long as they were divorced from individual moral commitment or social action: this was largely the direction taken, often unwittingly, by Futurism. Others retreated into introspective, alternatively nostalgic and bitterly pessimistic work. In the end, the Futurists, who in their second phase sought to reconcile the modern with the classical, would transform their initial celebration of technological change. They would develop it into a rhetorical ornament that did not disturb the social conservatism of the Fascist regime.

By 1924, Mussolini’s charisma, combined with intimidation, ensured a win for Fascism of an absolute majority in parliament. A turning point came with the murder on June 10, 1924, of Giacomo Matteotti, who had spoken out passionately against the brutal Fascist methods. In 1925, Giovanni Gentile, at that time Fascism’s official ideologue, wrote the “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals,” which presented Fascism as the heir to the Italian Risorgimento, as evidenced by its capacity to unite Italy in a totalitarian and spiritual fashion: some 250 intellectuals signed it, including Ungaretti. Other intellectuals objected. Their leader, Benedetto Croce, responded with the “Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals” (also 1925), signed by about 200 initially, and later by many more. It would be the last time such open criticism could be voiced. By 1926 the death penalty had been instituted for severe political crimes, and anti-Fascists were increasingly being sent into internal exile (confino) or imprisoned, sometimes never to reemerge. The 1929 Lateran Pacts, which sealed the alliance between Fascism and the Catholic Church, paved the way for imposing an ever tighter cultural consensus on citizens. In 1931 the government required all university professors to swear allegiance to Fascism or lose their posts: they overwhelmingly complied, though by then many had already fled or been purged. Cultural life was all but immobilized by the “continual awareness of there being no way out” (Pavese in Cary, p. 21).

Resistance developed slowly because disenchantment with Fascism could only grow in isolation and secrecy. Intellectuals such as Ungaretti continued to support certain aspects of the regime, such as agricultural and other public projects. At the same time, major journals—such as the anti-Fascist Solaria (1926-36), in which Ungaretti published—adopted increasingly indirect, metaphoric ways to signal their awareness of Fascist violence. For example, writers devised an imaginary interview with a “foreigner,” translated “non-Fascist” authors, or slyly transposed political issues into a seemingly apolitical domain, like literary criticism (Ungaretti engaged in the last two). Another avenue, albeit one that required caution, was the publication of works that might be construed as anti-Fascist in foreign journals such as Marguerite Caetani’s Parisian Commerce (1924-32), in which Ungaretti was quite active.

Another pivotal juncture came in 1935, when Italy’s colonial war in Ethiopia led to economic sanctions against Italy by the League of Nations and ultimately to Mussolini’s turn toward Hitler’s Germany. The alliance, signed in 1936 and sealed by Hitler’s visit to Rome in 1938, brought the spread of racial laws in Italy in September of that same year. Deportations began, and Jews were no longer able to teach or publish in the country. Italy proceeded to fight a disastrous war alongside Germany. In July 1943, after the Americans had landed in Sicily, Fascism fell and Mussolini was arrested. A new Italian government signed an armistice with the Allies as they came to liberate south-central Italy, and the Nazis reacted. They rescued Mussolini and put him at the head of a so-called social republic (the Re public of Salò, 1943-45) in the Nazi-occupied North. Suddenly the country was split in two. The Fascists and Nazis became occupying forces, confronted not only by the Americans, who fought their way north, but also by Italian anti-Fascists, who began organizing a military resistance to the Republic of Salò, which precipitated a civil war in the North. On April 25, 1945, the insurrection of the internal resistance movement combined with a military push by the Allies finally brought Mussolini down and liberated the North. But there were grave consequences. The civil war had not only divided northern Italians; there had been political divisiveness in the resistance movement itself, among Catholics, liberals, and Communists (the majority). In the war’s aftermath, all these groups angled for power, sometimes violently. American pressure ultimately ensured a conservative, Christian Democrat government in Italy, which was a blow to many of Italy’s intellectuals, who at this point favored more radical, anti-Fascist parties.

In these years, a newly free press exposed both Fascist and Nazi violence, shocking Italians out of complacency and consent. Hence postwar Italy was shaped not only by the renewed psychological trauma of mass death, but also by a historical trauma that could be framed by a series of uncomfortable questions: How could so many Italians, and especially artists and thinkers, have supported such a repressive regime and, worst of all, the alliance with Nazi genocide? How strong and long-lived had the Resistance been? Why was social injustice as bad, if not worse, in postwar Italian society as before the war?

In literature and cinema, the neorealism movement developed in the 1950s and 1960s as a postwar answer to these questions. It was based on the fiction of writers who had participated in the Resistance (Italo Calvino, Carlo Cassola, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi), and on documentary-like films about the war’s end (by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti). To varying degrees, neorealist works shared two characteristics, stemming from their authors’ desire to empower the individual against Fascist ideology: first, the works were committed to a narrative realism based on the accumulation of true-to-life details and the interplay of multiple points of view; second, they emphasized personal freedom in making moral choices, aiming to elicit compassion for the oppressed and disdain for political conformism. Neorealist works, in the infancy of the movement, suggested that few Italians had really supported the regime in their day-to-day lives or conscience, and that in their hearts Italians of all political stripes had joined in a resistance movement aimed exclusively at the Nazis and a few hardened Fascists. In this climate, the purging of intellectuals who had collaborated with the Fascist regime was driven as much by a need to condemn “the few” who were “really responsible” as by the need to uphold a worldview in which historical responsibility was clear-cut. Writers like D’Annunzio and Marinetti became pariahs (even though they were dead) not only because of their involvement with the regime, but also because their antirealistic styles came to be associated with a dangerous moral relativism. In contrast, Ungaretti, with his spare style, would survive the era of purges almost unscathed.

As neorealism evolved into new forms of experimentation from the 1970s onward, however,

UNGARETTI AND FASCISM

Ungaretti’s support of Fascism remains an uncomfortable subject. Undoubtedly, like many intellectuals, he believed in its promise to reorganize the social classes and reestablish “the dream … that comes from the people” (Ungaretti, Saggi e Interventi. pp. 151, 153; trans. L. Wittman). From Ungaretti’s vantage point. Fascism was revolutionary, antibourgeois (it seemed to reject material gain in favor of spiritual renewal), and progressive (as manifested in its great public works campaigns). This would explain why in 1919 he joined Mussolini’s Fasci (Fascist Party), dedicated to Mussolini the poem “The People” in The Joy of Shipwrecks, and sought a preface by him for a 1923 edition of The Buried Harbor (a preface never included in subsequent editions). Yet, as Ungaretti repeatedly pointed out, he never received special favors from the regime and was in fact arrested more than once for complaining about it. He helped various friends escape arrest and, at great personal risk, sheltered a young Jewish woman around 1943-44. At liberation, in 1944, Ungaretti was suspended from his university post (on grounds that he got it from the Fascist regime without proper competition), was examined by three commissions, and (after suffering a heart attack) was reinstated in 1946 when the government left the decision to the university faculty alone.

Nonetheless, Francesca Petrocrhi’s publications of Ungaretti’s letters to Mussolini (in 1987 and 1995), among other writings, give the lie to the notion that the poet’s involvement with the regime was purely idealistic. He joined the party, as noted wrote articles in the 1920s defending the Fascist restoration of order, and participated in the 1925 Congress of Fascist Intellectuals in Bologna. Twenty years later, on November 22, 1945, writing his French friend Jean Paulhan. who was about to risk his reputation by resisting the persecution of French writers who had collaborated with the Nazis, Ungaretti expounded on the unclear nature of political choices at the time: ‘I was very fond of Drieu [the French writer la Rochelle, who had just committed suicide after being threatened as a result of his collaboration], and I was truly saddened. It is difficult to know who is right and who is wrong, at a time when the world is in the middle of such a tragic change, which is far from having ended its cycle” (Ungaretti, Correspandance, p. 353).

the questions raised by the Fascist experience were revisited. Indeed, the undeniable support of many Italians for the regime (including intellectuals, and even Resistance icons such as Ignazio Silone) continues to be the subject of artistic as well as scholarly investigation. Ungaretti’s politics were, in truth, precariously balanced between an extremely rigorous assertion of moral and spiritual conscience, on one hand, and, on the other, a sincere, if also convenient, belief in Fascism’s “revolutionary” promises, particularly with regard to the creation of a more equitable Italian society. This ambivalent attitude was emblematic of a whole generation of intellectuals, in whom blindness toward Fascist oppression was furthered by a high-minded refusal to enter the fray of politics. From this perspective, Ungaretti’s 1933 book of poetry, A Sense of Time, often read as a call for personal moral commitment, must also be read as a tragic witness to the powerlessness of the individual in the face of Fascism (and all modern forms of nationalism).

UNGARETTI ON STYLE AND WORLD WAR I

Ungaretti claimed the lack of rhyme, punctuation, and grammatically complete thoughts in his collection Joy was due to the war more than avant-garde experimentation “War suddenly revealed the [new] language to me. That is, I had to speak quickly because time might turn out to be very short, and most tragically … quickly I had to express what I felt quickly with few words … and thus with words that had to acquire an extraordinary intensity of meaning”.

(Ungaretti, Saggi e Interventi, p. 820; trans. L. Wittman).

His 1936 move to Brazil too must be seen as an escape and a defeat, not a rebellion. Fascism, his experience implies, stemmed not from the moral failure of the few, but from the moral crisis of the many, whose desire for absolute answers and uncompromising politics were fuelled in part by an inability to live with uncertainty about the future. In response, Ungaretti’s postwar poems in Life of a Man move from individual powerlessness and an acknowledgment of inevitable errors to the search for a human commonness in suffering, and in joy, that might serve as an alternative to the homogenizing power of an un-compromising ideology. The merit of his work lies not in his own political choices, but rather in his ability to lay bare the conflicts, uncertainties, and compromises inherent in individual moral struggle. Unlike the previous generations’ pessimism and retreat from action, Ungaretti’s verse urges us to engage in this struggle even though we cannot fully control its outcome.

The Poems in Focus

Contents summary

Ungaretti’s Life of a Man is divided into three phases, according to the author’s autobiographical writings. The first phase evokes the “horror of eternity” and the “familiarity with death” experienced in World War I (Ungaretti, Saggi e Interventi, p. 130; trans. L. Wittman); the second explores the unfolding of existential time, backward, from the perspective of death, as the poet seeks to rediscover an initial innocence through memory; the third discovers a sacred dimension in this struggle.

Phase One: Joy

The collection Joy begins with the section “The Last Ones,” the final pre-World War I poems written by Ungaretti, which evoke his sense of isolation as a returning emigrant (with the help of the nothingness of the African desert). Throughout the collection, the images are stark and fragmented; the lines, grammatically incomplete and lacking in rhyme and punctuation. As he writes in “Insomnia,” dated December 23, 1915,

A whole night
crushed against
a massacred
companion with his contorted
mouth
turned to the moonlight
…
I wrote
letters full of love
          (Ungaretti, Tutte le Poesie, p. 25; trans. L. Wittman)

Unlike his later poems, those in Joy stem from a single moment of intuition, as indicated by the precise date and time that usually accompany them.

“The Buried Harbor,” Joy’s longest section, focuses on the “sentiment of participating in others’ suffering” (Ungaretti, Saggi e Interventi, p. 821; trans. L. Wittman). Its central image is drawn from the original harbor of Alexandria, buried underwater and only lately discovered. For Ungaretti, it represented the subterranean source of poetic intuitions, uniquely individual yet reaching into a collective unconscious and expressed in word play (Italian terms with multiple meanings, inner rhymes, anagrams, acrostics, and puns).

In the section “Brothers” the meaning of the title word is radically transformed by its metaphorical description in the poem as a “shuddering … leaf” that expresses the “involuntary rebellion / of man present to his own / frailness.” Before this metaphor, in the first two lines, brothers is used with fear in the question “What regiment are you from / brothers?”; at the end, constituting by itself the whole last line of the poem, it becomes a statement of existential unity (Ungaretti, Selected Poems, p. 31).

The next section, “Shipwrecks,” opens with “The Joy of Shipwrecks,” a poem in which the poet asserts the paradoxical discovery of the whole collection: moments of joy—when he feels his unity with creation (notwithstanding the horrors of war)—are reached only through shipwreck or suffering and are always temporary.

“Wanderer,” a very short section written after Caporetto and before the war’s end, characterizes wartime “wandering” as a permanent existential erring in search of “one minute of inchoate / life” (Ungaretti, Selected Poems, p. 67). In contrast to the opening of the collection, the final section is entitled “First Ones”; it prefigures the next phase’s turn to memory to rediscover or at least to search for lost innocence.

Phase Two: A Sense of Time

This three-part collection meditates on the fleeting nature of poetic intuitions, corrupted as they are by time. Stylistically, the collection reflects a “return to order,” which, for Ungaretti, took the form of a new emphasis on two elements. Stressed in this collection is the Italian poetic tradition behind specific words (e.g. shipwreck, derived from Giacomo Leopardi’s famous 1819 poem “The Infinite”). Secondly the section stresses the hendecasyllable (the major verse of Italian lyric poetry, comparable to the iambic pentameter in English), which stresses the tenth syllable in an eleven-syllable line). There are complex ensembles of images in this section, in which memory struggles to redeem time: D’altri diluvi una colomba ascolto. For example, in the line “From within other floods to a dove I listen,” the dove, an image of peace and the holy spirit, and in Italian poetry of maidenly innocence, is transformed into a more modern and indefinable salvation by its flight over “other” floods, which suggest the recent cataclysm of World War II (”A Dove,” Tutte le Poesie, p. 113; trans. L. Wittman). These poems are dated only by their year, reflecting a longer maturation than those in the first collection.

The first part of A Sense of Time includes three sections, written during Ungaretti’s first years in Rome, when he spent nights wandering in the Tivoli gardens; here the decay of the Roman countryside represents historical memory and civilization’s decadence. Time is a “fleeting tremor,” bringing us “concealed whispers” from the past (Ungaretti, Selected Poems, p. 83). The second part also consists of three sections—”Legends,” “Hymns,” and “Death Meditated”: here time unfolds as the drama of the self exposed to its own nothingness, longing for its redemption into the eternal from the ephemeral. Individual memory now persecutes the poet by suggesting that no redemption from time’s error is possible; time marches on erratically, unpredictably, moving away from an original pristine condition. The “Hymns” in particular mark a religious crisis, in which Ungaretti wonders whether he has fallen prey to a “servitude to words” that are nothing but “phantoms” and “dry leaves,” because from man’s hands there “issue endlessly only limits,” so that to think of the “Eternal, He has only blasphemies” (Ungaretti, Selected Poems, pp. 121, 127). Written between 1928 and 1932, these poems allude to Ungaretti’s return to Catholicism by evoking his awareness of his distance from God. This collection closes with the poem “A sense of time,” in which the poet hopes that the “distance” between ephemeral limits and eternal primordial innocence might be “open to [the] measure” of God’s mystery, to having a sense of this mystery (Ungaretti, A Major Selection, p. 245). The last section of A Sense of Time, “Love,” which focuses on aging and “perishing in [Ungaretti’s] flesh itself,” looks toward his later work. Unexpectedly the section celebrates the vitality of the very erring of memory with the cry, “Suffering, don’t leave me, stay!” (Ungaretti, Saggi e Interventi, p. 826; trans. L. Wittman; “Greetings for his own birthday,” Selected Poems, p. 147).

Phase Three: Affliction, The Promised Land, and more

Ungaretti’s third phase alternates between moments of peace (brought on by the poet’s learning to accept time as an inevitable yet temporary exile from the idea of the eternal) and moments of tumultuous suffering (brought on by perceiving this idea as an illusion and exile as a useless struggle against the void). In this spiritual torment, suffering is never placated by the momentary intuition or the echo of the eternal, which is, however, all that poetry can provide.

Spanning 1937 to 1946, Affliction, a collection inspired by tragedies of the 1930s and 1940s, divides into five sections. “I Have Lost Everything” consists of two poems that are outcries of petrified shock at the “obliterating nothingness” of the deaths of the poet’s son and brother (Ungaretti, Selected Poems, p. 185). “Day by Day” is the dramatic unfolding of Ungaretti’s mourning for his son in one 17-stanza poem, while “Time Is Silent” delves into the bittersweet recollection of his son’s young innocence. “Toward a Pine” consists of a single poem with the same title, which envisions Ungaretti’s return to Rome as a pilgrimage to a “soaring” pine that, among ruins “full of memories,” still “reache[s] out” “undaunted” though “contorted” in “mortification” (Ungaretti, Tutte le Poesie, p. 219; trans. L. Wittman). “Rome Occupied” and “Memories” meditate on how the pain of the present overwhelms even those past moments that seemed happy (Ungaretti, Tutte le Poesie, p. 237).

The phase’s remaining collections include The Promised Land, described as “fragments” of a goal that could not be fully reached (Ungaretti, Tutte le Poesie, p. 546; trans. L. Wittman). The collection begins with the immobile void of death in order to invoke (in Platonic terms) the turn away from the world of appearances toward a new dawn in which an ideal love is reborn. Three figures from Roman mythology represent, in turn, the poet’s initial determination to face death serenely, as a passage into eternal innocence (like the hero Aeneas visiting the underworld); his inability to leave behind an autumnal yet golden sensual love (abandoned Dido in the throes of passion even after death); and finally his discovery that a serene death is the supreme illusion, the mistaken notion of having reached the impossible-to-reach promised land (shipwrecked Palinurus, Aeneas’ helmsman, thinks he will find land but in fact continues to be borne by the waves even in death). This last phase—A Cry and Landscapes (again for his son, and about Rome)—includes some final collections and poems: The Old Man’s Notebook’, “Apocalypses”; “Proverbs”; Dialogue, and New Ones. All of them are subsumed under the sign of shipwreck, that is, of a forever unreachable promise of salvation. In the concluding poem, “The Petrified and the Velvet,” the speaker is almost obliterated in the stony abstraction of death, but then suddenly awakened by a velvet gaze to long for a redemption. In the end, he calls out for mercy, shuddering at the deathly void that lies ahead.

Revelation and illusion

Ungaretti’s poetry returns throughout the years to a critical question: since the aspiration toward eternity (or the pursuit of innocence) is founded on intuition and echo, is this aspiration merely an illusion? Or, as a 1916 poem asks, “Closed off among things that die / (Even the starry sky will end) / Why do I long for God?” (Ungaretti, Selected Poems, p. 25). This question is Ungaretti’s expression of a quintessentially modern quandary: Why is Western civilization still vitally concerned, through longing or even denial, with a “God,” even as its culture increasingly lacks any vocabulary with which to discuss religious sentiment? Is this concern just nostalgic illusion?

Though Ungaretti eventually became a practicing Catholic, his faith was never dogmatic and always permeated by doubt: his poetry reflects this spiritual struggle. Ironically it enables him to reconcile what his predecessors could not, to achieve an acceptance of modernity’s chaotic lack of meaning and to rebel against it without merely returning to older certainties.

For Ungaretti, to rebel against meaninglessness and defend existence necessarily involves facing death and the reality of non-existence. “O Night,” which opens A Sense of Time, meditates on poetry’s role in defining a new religious sentiment based not on articles of faith but rather on the more extreme claim that the ultimate meaning of death is an impenetrable mystery. “O Night” uses two different poetic images to illustrate Ungaretti’s unique intertwining of hope and despair. The section speaks of “oceanic silences / celestial nests of illusion,” alluding on the one hand to the belief that silence is celestial, that it is God’s sublime silence, and fear is but an illusion, for human existence is ultimately one with the immense night (Ungaretti, Tutte le poesie, p. 103; trans. L. Wittman). On the other hand, in those same lines Ungaretti invokes the belief that the night sky and its sublimity is an “illusion” (like his predecessor Leopardi, who wrote “The Infinite,” in which such silence leads to a shipwreck in which existence is annulled). While D’Annunzio and other writers of the preceding generation often turned away from such pessimistic irony and embraced some faith in God’s sublime silence, Ungaretti’s vision remains suspended between faith and pessimistic irony. Moreover, by envisioning nests, Ungaretti proposes a paradox: it can be nurturing rather than frightful not to know whether longing for God can reach any harbor. Within the “starry silence,” “trees and the night” are born and live and move “from nests” (Ungaretti, Selected Poems, p. 151). Life in all its risky vitality is linked to a refusal to make assertions about God’s existence.

Thus, Ungaretti expresses a modern anxiety through complex allusions that link his poems with one another and with tradition. Stylistic techniques such as ambiguity, oxymoron, and allusion make all certainties recede, opening us to the anguish of questions. Condensed in the Italian words svelata alberatura, the image of “trees like masts revealed,” could also be read as “masts like trees revealed,” which raises the question, Are these the dead remains of a shipwreck come back to life or are they living trees that are becoming ossified and sterile? Ungaretti’s poetry refuses to give any answer, instead conveying the urgency of the question itself, acting on his belief that “the [poetic] word has a sacred value derived from technical difficulty itself” (Ungaretti, Saggi e Interventi, p. 762; trans. L. Wittman). The search for oxymoron and ambiguity, the very attempt to make language turn back upon itself, against its desire for clarity, is religious because through it we experience our distance from the mystery, our fallen-ness, our need for redemption.

Sources and literary context

Because Ungaretti’s education was predominantly French, his initial inspiration came from the late-nineteenth-century French symbolist and decadent poets, mainly Charles Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, and Stéphane Mallarme, as well as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Marking the final Romantic rebellion against bourgeois materialism, these poets were “outcasts,” living in a time of “disorientation” that forced them to try ever more desperate physical and moral experiments to evade their “hallucinated” solitude (Ungaretti, Saggi e Interventi, pp. 22-23; trans. L. Wittman). Filtered first through avant-garde and Futurist writings, this experimentation gave rise to the modern poetic fragment, which mirrored a broken society and a shattered psyche by scattering the different elements of analogy across the page in brief lines or words surrounded by the white void of silence. Though all this experimentation influenced Ungaretti, he distanced himself from what he saw as Futurism’s purely destructive value, subscribing to Henri Bergson’s philosophy that intuition can briefly grasp how fragments are opposed to, yet caught in, the eternal flow of time.

The French symbolists thought Western civilization had reached its decadent phase, like the Roman Empire once did. In this environment, poetry was a form of music that ought to evoke a mood rather than a mental or moral reaction. The belief was that everything in the mind correlated to something in nature and that everything in nature correlated to something in the spirit world—hence the focus on the symbol. One line of Symbolist poetry (emblematized by Stéphane Mallarmé, 1842-98) aimed for a formal perfection seen as “decadent” in that coming at the end of Western tradition, it could concentrate the greatest ambiguity of meanings in single images and words. Another line of Symbolist poetry reached back to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and through his work to that of Michelangelo. In Baudelaire and Michelangelo,

“O NIGHT”

From dawn’s widening anxiety.
Trees like masts revealed.

Suffered awakenings.

Leaves, sister leaves,
I listen to your lament.

Autumns,
Dying sweetness.

O youth,
Just past is the hour of parting.

Upswept skies of youth,
Freely rushing.

And already I am desert.

Lost in this curving melancholy.

But night dispels distances.

Oceanic silences.
Celestial nests of illusion,

O night.
          (Ungaretti, Tutte le poesie, p 103; trans. L Wittman)

Ungaretti saw the same “dramatic” confrontation “of heaven and hell,” the same “precariousness,” the same “horror of a world deprived of God,” and (most emblematically in Michelangelo’s sculpture the Milan Pittà, c. 1555-64) the same “horror” of “a body without a soul” (Ungaretti, Saggi e Interventi, p. 208; Tutte le Poesie, pp. 534-35; trans. L. Wittman). Rather than formal perfection and the mystery of the poetic word, such poetry emphasized a lacerating awareness of the immense abyss between man and God. Caught in a world of appearances understood as illusions, the poet can only hurl his cry against emptiness, turning from the shadows without yet seeing the night (let alone the dawn) ahead. It is in this last consideration that Ungaretti comes closest to D’Annunzio but also proves most intent on by-passing him to invent a different tradition for modern Italian poetry. Most obviously, D’Annunzio’s titanic pessimism gives way to a more existential mourning: like the leaves in “O Night,” lost illusions still rustle in the distance, as the poet learns through irony to accept both their falseness and their beauty.

While little concrete detail is known about Ungaretti’s piety, as he was a very private person, it is clear that his Catholicism was connected to the religious modernism that flourished before World War I. Open to the varieties of religious experience, its ideals were focused on compassion and the alleviation of suffering. Ungaretti situated the core of religious experience in the noli me tangere (the moment between the resurrection and the ascension, when Christ appears but cannot be touched). Invariably he emphasized not the Church as institution but the individual religious drama and the human solidarity it could foster. Moreover, Ungaretti’s religious sentiment took inspiration from Plato in that it understood the world of existence as exile from the world of eternal forms. The philosophy of Bergson suggested that one might glimpse these forms through poetic intuitions, but also gave rise to the idea that eternal forms might be merely another illusion. The attempt to reconcile Plato and Bergson is yet another illustration of Ungaretti’s intertwining of hope and despair, of horror at the abyss and ironic distancing.

Impact

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Ungaretti published extensively in journals in both France and Italy, acquiring a reputation as a leader in laying the foundation for a modern Italian poetry, one that would reinvent tradition. As the critic Alfredo Gargiulo wrote, “such purity …, which is undoubtedly the supreme aspiration of modern lyricism, can be found no where and in no one so much as in Ungaretti” (Gargiulo in Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo, p. 7; trans. L. Wittman). By 1939-40, a number of major critics, from Gargiulo, to Carlo Bo, Gianfranco Contini, and Giuseppe De Robertis, had acknowledged the complex existential dimension of Ungaretti’s work. They also attributed to him, along with the poets Eugenio Montale and Umberto Saba, the invention of a new poetic movement, dubbed “hermeticism” because of its emphasis on formal beauty and penchant for oblique references to tradition. Though Ungaretti did not deny the “hermetic” quality of his work, he disassociated himself from the movement, insisting on the moral and metaphysical dimensions of his poetry. In retrospect it is clear that Ungaretti, as well as the younger Montale, demonstrated that formal perfection could embody a modern spiritual searching, paving the way for a new tradition of metaphysical or speculative poetry in Italy, one that dramatically puts the very edifice of metaphysics in question yet does not deny the power of religious longing.

—Laura Wittman