More than a century has now passed since F. T. Marinetti's famous "Futurist Manifesto" slammed the door on the nineteenth century and trumpeted the arrival of modernity in Europe and beyond. Since then, against the backdrop of two world wars and several radicalsocial upheavals whose effects continue to be felt, Italian poets have explored the possibilities of verse in a modern age, creating in the process one of the great bodies of twentieth-century poetry. Even before Marinetti, poets such as Giovanni Pascoli had begun to clear the weedy rhetoric and withered diction from the once glorious but by then decadent grounds of Italian poetry. And their winter labours led to an extraordinary spring: Giuseppe Ungaretti's wartime distillations and Eugenio Montale's "astringent music"; Umberto Saba's song of himself and Salvatore Quasimodo's hermetic involutions. After World War II, new generations - including such marvellously diverse poets as Sandro Penna, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli, Vittorio Sereni, and Raffaello Baldini - extended the enormous promise of the pre-war era into our time.
A surprising and illuminating collection, "The FSG Book of Twentieth- Century Italian Poetry" invites the reader to examine the works of these and other poets - seventy-five in all - in context and in conversation with one another. Edited by the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, these poems have been beautifully rendered into English by some of our finest English-language poets, including Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Paul Muldoon, and many exciting younger voices.
- ISBN10 0374105383
- ISBN13 9780374105389
- Publish Date 27 March 2012
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 10 March 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 736
- Language English