Quasimodo's position in the hermetic movement is rather more complicated to assess than that of the poets considered hitherto, for just as Ungaretti first initiated and then lived the hermetic revolution of the twenties and thirties, so he first stimulated and then largely lived the humanist revolution of the forties and fifties. Moreover, this second revolution, far from being detached and reticent in manner like its predecessor, aimed openly at participating in the real world—at a state of symbiosis between the cultural ethos of society and the single artistic temperament operating within it. Hence, although Quasimodo like Ungaretti before him had his ear closely attuned to the requirements of his age, it was only at the outset of his career that he reacted to his cultural environment specifically as a hermetic poet. Later his manner became so discursive that some critics have maintained that his involvement with the school was the result of a misunderstanding arising out of his collaboration with Montale, Saba and others in the periodical Solaria. This thesis too, however, seems somewhat vitiated by the fact that after the appearance of Oboe sommerso (1932) he was acknowledged as the hermetic movement's caposcuola. In all probability the confusion derives from the spurious critical contention mentioned earlier, which claims that hermeticism is a phenomenon belonging to the thirties alone. Instead, what actually emerged at that time was a revived hermeticism involving a Petrarchist type of mimesis of its earlier forms. Nevertheless one important distinction does seem to exist from the beginning between Quasimodo and his fellow-hermetic poets, namely, his tendency to rely on rational, not associative, imagery for his effects. His addiction to Descartes' geometrical method is clearly detectable in his early imaginative cult of circles, spirals and other mathematical designs, which together tend to reduce his images to a state of Mallarmean abstraction, described by Zagarrio in typically Quasimodean terms as ‘un formidabile sforzo di “curvatura”’¹ (‘tremendous power of “curvature”’). Such a procedure—often supported by infolded hermetic ‘chimismi’—underlines the point that Quasimodo was at that time ‘imprigionato nei limiti della propria anima’² (‘imprisoned within the confines of his own soul’), despite an explicit denial of this tendency made on his behalf by Carlo Bo.

By contrast, the most vital elements in the hermetic ethos which found a response in his sensibility were its atavism and its infolded political overtones, since he soon seems to have realized, as Paparelli has noted, that ‘l'ansia dell'uomo contemporaneo—il nostro mal du siècle—non è di ordine metafisico o psicologico, ma sociale’³ (‘the anxiety of modern man—our mal du siècle—is not of a metaphysical or psychological order, but a social one’). His hermetic posture could therefore only be an uneasy solipsist one, because it tended to distract him from exploring the arcana of authentically felt ‘social’ relationships and aimed instead at making him the master of a rationally reconstituted, but sensorially degraded, universe of involuted images. So, even though he undertook from the outset an Apollonian pursuit of lyrical clarity, he made the perilous mistake of confining himself within the narrow emotional world of the second-generation hermetics; and their constantly shrinking perspectives eventually provoked in his mind a drama of self-destruction, unfolding in the shattered Inferno of Apollyon rather than in the Elysium of Apollo.

At first sight Quasimodo's poetic development will perhaps seem to consist of two separate phases, but these apparently distinct periods, as Bo has rightly pointed out,⁴ have a hidden relationship which removes from them all suspicion of a sudden, gratuitous change of spiritual design. The link between them lies in the poet's belief that every artist should consider himself free to undertake a thorough revaluation of society's moral and aesthetic standards while simultaneously acknowledging its continuing traditions as his guide for living. In his opinion tradition is simply a background force within which the authentic poet operates—normally by reaction. It is at one and the same time a potentially despotic taskmaster and a useful social bond offering him security within a wider scheme of living. Nevertheless this mature attitude is hardly detectable in his first volumes of verse because of his cult of spiritually regressive, memorial abstractions; and so, instead of evoking the social myth and natural landscapes in which to frame it, he makes his early word-pictures function as representations of the flora and fauna of an over-cerebral, private world rationally deducible from his extreme solipsist attitudes. As Stefanile was the first to note, this practice was bound eventually to result in ‘un'astratta geometria … un imponderabile mondo che sfugge a ogni percezione sensibile e solo per simboli si svela al cuore e all'intelligenza’⁵ (‘an abstract geometry … an imponderable world which evades all concrete perceptions and reveals itself to the heart and the intelligence only through symbols’).

From a symbolic standpoint the gradual widening of Quasimodo's lyrical canvas is punctuated by his acceptance of the sadder, more realistic atmospheres and the darker skies of Lombardy. But in his early career their acceptance still lies some way in the future and the aridity of his hermetic style gives us a clear indication of his dominant moods, most of which alternate between self-negation and escapism. Within such a dialectic his atavism is usually a prominent feature and consists of dynamic, closed emotions literally bursting for expression, but which are often unable to find their appropriate lyrical forms. Since these moods are mostly associated with Sicily, his sense of life's incommunicability tends in the course of time to provoke a psychological fear of alienation from his native land; and this was especially the case after he had left the island in the early twenties to practise as an engineer on the mainland. His exile forced him to cling more closely than ever to his childhood images of Sicilian life and he used their magical effects, very much as Montale used his talismans, as touchstones to guarantee his authenticity as a poet.

Gradually, however, his sense of vocation increased and with it a deep-seated restlessness and dissatisfaction with his chosen career in engineering. Hence, after having based himself for a decade in the south of Italy working in the construction industry, he eventually gravitated towards the literary world of Florence, into which he became fully integrated following his sister's marriage to the novelist Vittorini. From then on he entertained no further doubts whatsoever about his destiny as a poet, although his latent interest in literature had already been stirred as early as 1921, when he undertook a study of Latin and Greek poetry under the supervision of Monsignor Rampolla del Tíndaro. Even so, he only practised the art of lyricism in a somewhat dilettante and intermittent manner until he finally began to collaborate with the writers surrounding Solaria in 1930. Later, after having worked as a drama critic with the periodical Tempo for a short time, he was finally appointed Professor of Italian Literature at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan ‘per chiara fama’ (‘through clear renown’).

During his early years as an itinerant engineer the poet consoled himself, as we have already hinted, by re-evoking the mysterious echoes arising in his sensibility from his intensely Sicilian childhood memories. The attractions of the island's closed and secretive communities and its sun-drenched landscapes even tended occasionally to produce hallucinatory visions—so many manifestations of religion, blood and instinct—in his mind. Thus, as late as 1950, he could still forcefully assert: ‘La mia siepe è la Sicilia; una siepe che chiude antichissime civiltà e necropoli e latomie e telamoni spezzati sull'erba e cave di salgemma e zolfare e donne in pianto da secoli per i figli uccisi, e furori contenuti o scatenati, banditi per amore e per giustizia’.⁶ (‘My hedge is Sicily; a hedge which encloses ancient civilizations and necropoli and latomies and telamones smashed on the grass and saltpetre and sulphur quarries and women in mourning for centuries for their assassinated sons, and furies either unleashed or seething inwardly, and bandits through love or for the sake of justice’.) By that time, in fact, all his Sicilian memories had been concentrated into a single self-perpetuating core of images whose continuing validity may be verified by their appearance in his work in a multitude of moods and circumstances. And they continue to be generated even after he had finally become reconciled with the gloomier landscapes and the less violent colours of the North, a fact which suggests that a slightly sicilianized Lombardy is the point at which he blends his earlier provincial sensibility with the tonal colouring of the wider Italian tradition. Hence within his mature evocations of the unrelieved melancholy of Lombardy with its endless mist and rain we sense a constant desire to recapture multidimensionally the intense sensations and richer landscapes of the South.

These archetypal Sicilian features are, moreover, placed in a nostalgic memorial setting in his later work and their sources are the poet's own youthful images appearing in his early collections of verse, where their impact was already heightened by a powerful undercurrent of visual and atavistic sensations. Even at the end of his life they still represented for Quasimodo what Bo calls the ‘vert paradis’ (‘green paradise’) of his childhood.⁷ and they are likely to re-emerge as half-remembered visions of peace and serenity at all critical points in his career. They tend in other words to punctuate the stages of his spiritual development away from solipsism towards a modern form of humanism. Consequently, whereas in his early poetry he evokes many images of failed lyrical redemption like his sleeping or dead angels whom he immerses in an atmosphere of refined but aseptic aestheticism:

Dorme l'angelo
su rose d'aria, candido,
sul fianco,
a bacio del grembo
le belle mani in croce,(8)

The angel sleeps, pure, on its side on airy roses, with its beautiful hands crossed over its bosom,

in his later lyrics these static metaphysical ciphers are replaced by more dynamically human figures of Sicilian womanhood bent in an eternal sorrow. Their intensely human postures in other words offer, in place of the statuesque poses of his angelic figures, a far more flexible and emotionally based attitude to life:

La nostra terra è lontana, nel sud,
calda di lacrime e di lutti. Donne,
laggiú, nei neri scialli
parlano a mezza voce della morte,
sugli usci delle case.(9)

Our land is far away, in the south, hot with tears and mourning. Women, down there, in black shawls speak in a low voice about death, on the doorsteps of the houses.

Although the main difference between these two word-pictures is the much greater degree of emotional commitment of the second, nevertheless even Quasimodo's early poetry is far from being emotionally threadbare despite its many restraints. The emotion he shows in it, however, is atavistic rather than broadly humanistic in quality, and it springs from his attempts to communicate with his remote Sicilian forbears and to create an emotional bond between their elemental desires and his own sensibility. They stand, so to speak, as the guardians of his secret island civilization, as may be seen in ‘Insonnia’ or other similar lyrics; and the poet feels himself brought into closer communion with these spirits of the past as he muses over the necropolis of Pantàlica in the Anapo valley. The necropolis in question consists of thousands of chambers cut out of the rock in pre-hellenic times and later used as a cave-town. In the poem Quasimodo feels himself viscerally bound to these early Sicels and tries to counterbalance his own incipient feelings of alienation by evoking an equal and opposite feeling of communion with their brooding telluric souls. In his wakeful dream their primitive passions frequently stir the deepest part of his being:

D'anni e anni, in cubicolo aperto
dormo della mia terra,
gli òmeri d'alghe contro grige acque:
nell'aria immota tuonano meteore.

For years and years, in an open cubicle of my land I sleep, my shoulders laden with seaweed against grey waters: in the motionless air meteors thunder.

But despite the atavistic and even cosmic yearnings implicit in this instinctive mysticism, its final outcome, perhaps, already proves to be a humanism in embryo, one which helps to throw into relief the underlying unity between the poet's two periods of development. Its features are apparent whenever the intension of the poet's orthodox hermetic symbolism is counterbalanced by the extension of a half-concealed allegory, and a good example of this polyvalency of poetic implication is to be seen in the opening fragment, ‘Ed è súbito sera’, in Acque e terre (1930):

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è súbito sera.

Everyone stands alone on the bosom of the earth transfixed by a ray of sunlight: and it is suddenly evening.

In this poem, as we have shown elsewhere,¹⁰ the three principal object-symbols (terra, sole and sera) are reductions of real phenomena to orphic archetypes, and in combination they are intended to illustrate the contingency of the entire human condition. They also tend to imply, at a somewhat less esoteric level, the principal stages of the human life-span, and in this sense they are already beginning to break away from the folds of hermetic involution. So, although at one level we can still visualize them as manifestations of a remote orphic iconography, they are simultaneously expanded, at least in part, into an emotional, or even a social, allegory. Their diffuse imagery, as opposed to the centripetal implications of his normal hermetic structures, clearly indicates in what direction Quasimodo's symbolism will eventually move and how it will gradually acquire the power to cope with the wider range of feelings detectable in most of his post-war collections.

Unfortunately, the overall perceptive range of Acque e terre does not measure up to that found in its opening composition, and so the poems it contains do little more than alternate in true hermetic style between the active and the passive memories. In all probability we can take the very title as symbolizing the orphic flow of the active memory (acque) and the immutability of the passive memory (terre) in a clearly Montalian sense. What is more, whereas we associate the purity of running water with the quicksilver of the active memory, we note that the main stress is placed here on a more sluggish memorial state symbolized by acquamorta (‘dead water’). In the poem of that name Quasimodo consequently creates a minor epic of almost Dantesque intensity, in which he contemplates existence as it declines into an irremediable state of ennui:

Acqua chiusa, sonno delle paludi
che in larghe lamine maceri veleni,
ora bianca ora verde nei baleni,
sei simile al mio cuore.
Il pioppo ingrigia d'intorno ed il leccio;
le foglie e le ghiande si chetano dentro,
e ognuna ha i suoi cerchi d'un unico centro
sfrangiati dal cupo ronzar del libeccio.
Cosí come su acqua allarga
il ricordo i suoi anelli, mio cuore;
si muove da un punto e poi muore:
cosí t'è sorella acquamorta.

Closed water, sleep of swamps, which in large sheets rets poisons, now white, now green, in the lightning flashes, you are like my heart. The poplar and the holm-oak grow grey all around; leaves and acorns lie still within, and each has its circles from a single centre distorted by the dark drone of the south-wester. Thus, as if on water memory widens its rings, my heart; it moves from a single point and then dies: and so dead water is a sister to you.

For anyone who has read Campana's poetry the orphic elements which abound here will hold few mysteries. But Quasimodo also tends to dichotomize life like Montale, and so symbols of rivers, streams, the sun, stars and life-giving rain denote positive qualities, while stagnant pools and the greenness of vegetable decay express negative ones. In the pool-image and the spectral whiteness of the lightning flash, moreover, we again perceive here the poet's preoccupation with rationalistic geometrical patterns.

In the first stanza a hallucinatory eye-image of the kind previously used by Pascoli and Corazzini is detectable, although with the present poet it is depicted indirectly as a stagnant pool winking intermittently in the lightning flashes of a subdued storm. The somnolence of the scene reinforces the dominant mood of noia, which is then further intensified by the overall greyness of the atmosphere and the poisonous corruption of the water. In combination, these elements are evidently intended to objectivize the shattered emotional state of Quasimodo's sensibility; but, when we later move on to the second stanza, the lyrical atmosphere becomes slightly modified and images of trees tend to predominate. Trees, as we shall see later, are almost invariably used by Quasimodo as figures of human anguish¹¹ and their bareness stresses their virtual inanimacy, as indeed does the fact that they are rooted in a dreary Gidean kind of marshland. So, although they offer some vague promise of rebirth by virtue of their action of storing away a potentiality of leaves and acorns, they too are enclosed in the same vicious circle of negative experience as the stagnant water. Hence they hardly respond at all to the promise of redemption borne by an atavistic wind, which once again has an obvious Montalian connotation. Finally, in the last stanza, we revert in a symmetrical fashion to the indirect eye-image of the first, although the landscape now seems metamorphosed into the inward eye of memory. Yet even memories quickly fade away as they are cast, wavelike, upon the glutinous water, with the result that the poet's heart lapses back into a state of apathy and threatens to abandon the unequal struggle for life.

Is there any way of escape from the poet's present mood of noia? Only, it seems, through a constant re-evocation of the rich sensations of his early Sicilian life. So Quasimodo tends from time to time to superimpose the latter upon his otherwise abstract and negative forms of imagery. But at this juncture not even Sicilian images always give rise to the immediate and joyful sensations we would expect, because they too are immersed in a cerebral medium which Macrí has defined as the parola-mito¹² (‘word-myth’). This type of symbolic structure is both monadic and archetypal in quality and it aims at providing through its meditative abstraction a ‘prova di esperienza totale’ (‘pledge of total experience’). The materials on which it operates are the poet's atavistic urges and his ratiocinatory, Cartesian concepts; and because of their very refractoriness they often produce images surrounded by an air of fragmented orphic mystery.

The outcome of such a technique is Mallarmean in quality, inasmuch as it distinguishes between the ‘état essentiel’ (‘essential state’) of the true poetic word and the ‘état brut et immédiat’ (‘immediate crude state’) of reality in the raw. The poet does not wish, it seems, to convey his sense-impressions directly through his lyricism but simply uses them as so many concrete pegs on which to hang the secret inner landscapes of his soul. At this stage such landscapes almost seem to be more real to him than reality itself, because they protect the responses of his sensibility from the crudeness of his everyday circumstances as a man imprisoned in a degraded world. Through their agency he tries to yoke together the earth and the heavens in a truly orphic fashion; and an awakening to an orphic state of mind is clearly likened by him in ‘Convalescenza’ to the regaining of a state of health, although a residual instinctive delirium is still present in the otherwise cosmic texture of the imagery:

Abbandoni d'alga:
mi cerco negli oscuri accordi
di profondi risvegli
su rive dense di cielo.

Languishing of seaweed: I search for myself in the obscure harmonies of deep awakenings, on dense shores of sky.

Such moods tend to border on an orphic romanticism, but fortunately Quasimodo's inspiration is not always of so facile, if disturbing, a quality. Instead a finely distilled realism replaces the orphic dream whenever he succeeds in walking the tightrope between concept and sensation. At such moments, despite the strict geometrical patterns to which he confines himself, he manages to introduce into his verse a refreshing series of visual images, although most still betray a certain generic aura. A good illustration is the poem ‘Terra’ where the indeterminate geometrical contours of parched hills and rolling plains are ultimately subordinated to the poet's desire to involve himself in the secret cycle of the earth's fertility:

Monti secchi, pianure d'erba prima
che aspetta mandrie e greggi,
m'è dentro il male vostro che mi scava.

Arid hills, plains of early grass that await herds and flocks, within me is your ache which scourges me.

Such thumb-nail sketches—although isolated—are highly significant, because they are indicative of the struggle taking place in the poet's mind between his incipient realist, and his previous solipsist, approaches to art—a struggle which will gradually be resolved in favour of the realist trend.

Nevertheless, detached, generic images are so prevalent at the present stage in his development that Flora once made an inventory of Quasimodo's pre-war archetypes,¹³ leading Antonielli, Romano and others to venture so far as to doubt their authenticity.¹⁴ Yet, despite the fact that their abuse does at times make certain poems highly obscure, their undeniable effectiveness in most cases offers us sufficient guarantees to discount any suspicion or intentional insincerity. What probably gave rise to such misgivings with some critics was the very ambivalence of the poet's parola-mito, especially when it operated on the level of the allegory and the emblem simultaneously. Yet even dual functions of this kind are often advantageous, since they allow the poet to construct his landscapes from archetypes which have whole planetary systems of poetic sub-symbols with diverse implications attached to them.¹⁵ For instance, the sub-symbols mare (‘sea’), fonte (‘fountain’), onda (‘wave’) are all linked by Quasimodo with the archetype acqua (‘water’), symbol of life's ‘élan vital’ and the associated orphic process of purification; similarly sera (‘evening’), buio (‘darkness’) ombra (‘shadow’) are variants of an archetypal, orphic notte (‘night’) denoting the mysteries connected with pure unformed existence. Other parallel chains derive from albero (‘tree’) symbolizing human anguish, from cuore (‘heart’) indicating the seat of the emotions, sangue (‘blood’) standing for instinct, and even angelo (‘angel’) representing a statuesque and hypostasized type of desire.¹⁶ Normally these sub-symbols can be regarded as examples of parola-mito in their own right, despite the fact that they retain powerful allusive overtones linking them back with their respective archetypes. Moreover, such cross-allusions help considerably in maintaining the overall coherence of the poet's early work, even though they can appear somewhat mechanical at times.

The point may be illustrated in a poem with the significant title of ‘Albero’. In it a tree puts on new foliage (fronda) by accepting the nourishment provided both by the orphic elements of the earth (terra, acqua) and the sky (sole), whereas the poet, by refusing such nourishment, fossilizes into a virtually insensitive object:

Non solo d'ombra vivo,
ché terra e sole e dolce dono d'acqua
t'ha fatto nuova ogni fronda,
mentr'io mi piego e secco
e sul mio viso tocco la tua scorza.

Alive not only with shadow, for earth and sun and a sweet gift of water have renewed all your leaves, while I bow down and dry out and on my face I touch your bark.

As we can see, he aims in this case at creating a subtle dialectic between interrelated, yet paradoxical, vegetative imagery. The intention behind such networks is to associate delicate chains of meditative responses with dramatic shifts of emphasis arising from unexpected metamorphoses between man and plants.

Similar transformations are characteristic of all levels of his inspiration and remind us at times of the lyricism of minor hermetics like De Libero.¹⁷ The process is, in fact, typical of the later hermetic movement as a whole and was no doubt chosen for its ready adaptability to an intense involution of imagery. With Quasimodo the identification of man and tree is a recurrent theme and in one poem he even describes his melancholy as ‘la mia tristezza d'albero malnato’¹⁸ (‘my sadness of an ill-starred tree’). Eventually this tendency towards ‘lignification’ even causes him to descend two grades in an apparently Dantesque hierarchy of intelligence, when his human nature loses its rational and sensitive qualities to degenerate into a pure vegetative state, somewhat like Pier delle Vigne's in the Inferno. He describes this state as one of ‘verde squallore’ (‘green squalor’) and it is intended once more to highlight his sense of alienation. Thus, although instinctively he continues to feel the uninhibited surging of the green fuse in springtime, his awareness of his loss of humanity provokes a countervailing mood of destructive clearsightedness. His numerous vegetative metamorphoses thereby punctuate his gradual descent to thing-hood and simultaneously underline the various stages of his spiritual sclerosis within the hermetic ethos.

The marmoreal beauty of his angel-symbols are also to be associated with this metaphysical, almost ratiocinatory, cult of soul-death. They prove to be so many orphic emblems of dehumanization measuring his steady rejection of living emotions for pure, geometrical figures. By reaction, their insensitivity also indicates that any attempt at wholesale metaphysical possession of the real by the poet will prove a futile and illusory operation. Such an aspiration can never slake man's Promethean thirst for self-knowledge, it can only turn his desires to ice in his hands, as in the following angel-image:

L'angelo è mio;
io lo posseggo: gelido.(19)

The angel is mine; I possess it: ice-cold.

To counteract the frigidity of this emotional wasteland Quasimodo thus often regresses to the experiences of his childhood and associates them with an escape towards distant racial memories. One of the most aesthetically refined examples of atavistic escape in his early verse is ‘Vento a Tíndari’ where a gradual attenuation of the poet's sense-impressions is counteracted by a rising Sicilian wind of racial passions which allows him to re-establish contact with the pristine realities of his youth.

The poem opens with the evocation of a hallucinatory seascape: a view of the Aeolian isles, home of the God of the winds, seen from the clifftop of Tíndari:

Tíndari, mite ti so
fra larghi colli pensile sull'acque
dell'isole dolci del dio,
oggi m'assali
e ti chini in cuore.

Tindari, gentle I know you are, hanging between wide hills over the waters of the sweet islands of the god, today you assail me and slip into my heart.

Its magic no doubt owes much to the well-known Leopardian technique whereby the poet deliberately limits himself to tracing out the visual outline of a scene so as to produce an infinite or indefinite perspective. But here the subtle contours of Quasimodo's idyll are even further attenuated by a vaporous and varying sense of melody. Indeed, at this stage the poet shows himself particularly adept at producing contrapuntal harmonies to offset subtle changes in his mood, so that at first the rhythm expresses excitement by the introduction of ante-penultimate stresses very much like the medieval cursus, while later this excitement subsides and fades away in the dying falls of lines like ‘ti chini in cuore’. Of great importance, too, is the vowel pattern beginning with an insistence of the shrill incisiveness of the letter ‘i’ and then slowly becoming more deeply modulated through the increasing presence of full-throated sounds like ‘a’ and ‘o’. The resulting lyrical alchemy is by no means a forced one: it evokes in our minds a multidimensional picture of a half-forgotten Sicilian strand harking back in its slumber to some long-past civilization. Its atmosphere not only recalls the fabulous mythological infancy of Sicily itself but also the wider cultural perspectives of Magna Graecia which are eventually superimposed on it through the ‘nitidezza’ (‘clarity’) of Quasimodo's classically orientated, yet often almost Alexandrine, manner.

By the time of the writing of the poem, however, the mysterious call of the poet's island memories had somewhat receded and only continued to stimulate an area at the back of his mind. So, in order to refocus his childhood images in his inward eye, he had to abandon realities—his exile on the mainland—and wind back his thoughts in an atavistic trance, until such time as his early impressions took on flesh again and came flooding back to him in all their pristine freshness:

Salgo vertici aerei precipizi,
assorto al vento dei pini,
e la brigata che lieve m'accompagna
s'allontana nell'aria,
onda di suoni e amore,
e tu mi prendi
da cui male mi trassi
e paure d'ombre e di silenzi,
rifugi di dolcezze un tempo assidue
e morte d'anima.

I climb up peaks, airy precipices, caught in the wind of the pines, and the happy company which follows me moves off into the air, a welter of sounds and love, and you seize me, from whom I unwillingly drew away and fears of shadows and silences, once assiduous retreats of sweetness and soul-death.

The day-dreaming here is once again activated by a Montalian wind blowing within an otherwise generic Sicilian landscape of peaks and precipices. Yet for all its generic features the scene is strangely reminiscent of the precipitous coastline around Tíndari.

Such a combination of wind and scenery permits the poet to explore the storehouse of his secret Sicilian soul, though many of its haunting reminiscences are now blurred, as if seen through a darkened mirror. The bitter-sweet of these memories shows that so far he has not been able to insert himself into any tradition which can adequately replace his childhood involvement in the island's provincial mythology, and this accounts for his turning to love as a palliative for his feelings of solitude and isolation. Eventually he hopes that love (and the wife he had then recently married, we note, was a Northerner) will serve as a kind of stepping-stone to reintegrate him into a Italian society upon a more satisfying human plane. But at present even love proves ineffective and he is left with a fragmented sensibility as he meditates ruefully on the debilitating effects of exile:

Aspro è l'esilio,
e la ricerca che chiudevo in te
d'armonia oggi si muta
in ansia precoce di morire;
e ogni amore è schermo alla tristezza,
tacito passo nel buio
dove mi hai posto
amaro pane a rompere.

Bitter is exile, and the search for harmony I reposed in you now changes to a precocious desire for death; and every love is a screen for sadness, a silent step in the dark where you have placed bitter bread for me to break.

On the other hand the poet's ‘tristezza’ contrasts markedly with the more despairing ‘male di vivere’ which dominates Montale's early work. For Quasimodo's sadness is not a product of metaphysical doubt; it does not question the validity of the human condition as such: it is simply a sense of humanistic loss which he experiences as a result of his failure to commit himself to an integrated and fruitful way of life. Eventually it inspires in him a half-suppressed desire to widen his hermetic field of vision, a process which in his post-war career will give rise to a full-blooded cult of humanism: one which will aim at fusing together his atavistic communion with his Sicilian roots and the exigencies of the wider modes of ‘convivenza’ he later discovers in the North. Even so, at this point there is little more than a slight hint of uneasiness as the poet's immediate audience stands aside in ‘Vento a Tíndari’ to allow a Sicilian friend²⁰ to help him regress towards a momentary state of communion with his island's age-old culture:

Tíndari serena torna;
soave amico mi desta
che mi sporga nel cielo da una rupe
e io fingo timore a chi non sa
che vento profondo m'ha cercato.

Tindari returns serene; a kind friend stirs me so that I can thrust myself into the sky from a rock, and I pretend to be afraid to those who do not know what deep wind has sought me out.

Such communion is, of course, atavistically and socially directed and reveals Quasimodo's transitional function as a poet. From it we can assess his relationship with the later hermetic lyricists, which was expressive or technical in nature rather than aesthetic or spiritual. So while their dominant approaches to life were largely metaphysical in orientation, his outlook derives from the involution of the views and attitudes of a fundamentally humanist philosophy.

The point is underlined by an aura of Greek clarity which was already emerging in his verse and which was rapidly to diminish his reliance on stylistic involution. One of his favourite Greek models of the thirties was Sappho whom he greatly admired for her precision and the previously mentioned quality of ‘nitidezza’.²¹ Quasimodo's Sappho is, however, mediated by Leopardi who in his view provides the link between Greek and Italian art in the modern world. The significance of his turning to a Graeco-Leopardian type of inspiration is that it was instrumental in refining away many of the turbulent sensations of blood and instinct underlying his early poetry. And it is indeed mainly through this twofold influence that he later succeeded in transforming his impetuous youthful emotions into the remarkably purified imagery of his maturity.

Side by side with the strain of ‘pure poetry’ in Acque e terre we also note a neo-crepuscular tonality intermingled with Pascolian effects. The crepuscular influence is more melodic than visual, as the following lines will show by their dying falls:

Mi parve s'aprissero voci,
che labbra cercassero acque,
che mani s'alzassero a cieli;(22)

It seemed as if voices opened up, that lips sought water, that hands were raised to heaven;

while the Pascolian tendency behind it is psychological and tonal. Thus Pascoli's influence is particularly noticeable in those poems which attempt to recapture the poet's childhood experiences, because Quasimodo then virtually allows himself to be absorbed by the elements of the scene he is describing. Such absorption gives rise to anthropomorphic imagery which is often highly effective. A lyric like ‘Vicolo’ is a case in point, for in it the poet appears to suspend his meditative faculty for a moment and evokes a childhood memory in all its pre-reflective purity. We find, therefore, that the very houses of the hamlet in which he lived whisper to one another in an atmosphere of almost primeval darkness, just as if they were so many secret repositories of Sicilian feelings. In short, we move momentarily into a dilated sphere of atavistic communion, not unlike that close communion with nature we detect in poems like Pascoli's ‘Il gelsomino notturno’. The significant lines from ‘Vicolo’ read:

Vicolo: una croce di case
che si chiamano piano,
e non sanno ch'è paura
di restare sole al buio.

Alleyway: a huddle of houses which softly call out to each other, and do not know that it is fear at being alone in the dark.

Naturally such intense sensations prove more difficult to recapture as time passes; and, when Quasimodo eventually senses the slackening of his grasp on his Sicilian sensations, he dwells on the dissolution of life itself. Experience is thereafter transformed by him into quick-and-dead imagery, and we can almost see a miniature epic of human growth and decay in ‘Antico inverno’:

Cercavano il miglio gli uccelli
ed erano súbito di neve;
cosí le parole.
Un po' di sole, una raggera d'angelo,
e poi la nebbia; e gli alberi,
e noi fatti d'aria al mattino.

The birds sought millet and were immediately as snow; likewise words. A touch of sun, the halo of an angel, and then the mist; and the trees, and ourselves made airy in the morning.

Possibly the poet is once again transposing here the hermetic distinction between the active and the passive memories on to an ethical plane. The paradox of the individual's limited life-span yet infinite memories is indeed an integral part of Quasimodo's lyrical outlook and we shall soon find him employing it as a spring-board to rise to higher planes of consciousness.

Needless to say, as his world-picture is slowly transformed to allow for a fuller participation in life, the poet's initial sadness gives way to restrained optimism: an optimism which is based on the discovery that atavistic resonances can function not only in the inner suspended world of hermeticism but also in the emotional continuum of a humanist society. He therefore proceeds to subvert the original intention behind modern orphism while at the same time applying its modalities to an exciting new range of social experiences. Eventually the changeover (which incidentally took place during and after the Second World War) had a traumatic effect on Italian literary life; but in Quasimodo's early poetry it still remains nothing more than a latent possibility. Not only is this true of Acque e terre but also of Oboe sommerso (1932) which, if anything, is marginally more hermetic in orientation than its predecessor. Sanesi, in fact, once described it as a kind of lyricism based on a ‘panteismo della memoria’²³ (‘pantheism of the memory’), and all that distinguishes it from the preceding collection is its much denser analogical structures and its completely bewildering allusiveness.

The poet's aim appears to be to evoke echoes from his now rapidly receding Sicilian dreamland in the ‘drowned’ modulations of a ‘submerged’ oboe, a practice reminding us of the music of Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie to which the title probably alludes. As his faraway melodies break through the surface of the water, they seem like reflections shimmering on the surface of pools, and only their vegetative element—which once again indicates a process of decomposition—links them with the real world. But, although a liquid and vegetative balance is achieved by the bitter smell of foliage which permeates the concentrated interiority of the following lines taken from ‘L'eucalyptus’,

In me un albero oscilla
da assonnata riva,
alata aria
amare fronde esala,

In me a tree quivers from a sleepy bank, wingèd air breathes forth bitter foliage,

the tree-image itself still remains symbolic of unresolved human anguish. Likewise the ‘assonnata riva’ now stands for some remote strand or ‘Saharah brumeux’ (‘misty Sahara’) beyond the bounds of time, in which the poet's Sicilian ancestors mysteriously subsist.

The scene also continues to retain an element of rêverie about it, mainly because of its semi-aquatic atmosphere which is evoked in the same impressionistic fashion as before; while the alchemistic effects of the entire collection are now strengthened by the use of extremely compressed and essentialized syntax. In Oboe sommerso, in particular, Quasimodo is always consciously striving to suppress logical links, to practise fulminatory juxtapositions of words and images, and to experiment with prepositions and other particles. Yet at the same time his symbolic archetypes remain surprisingly constant, indicating that despite his many new technical devices they still form the underlying substance of his lyricism.

As we would expect, the hermetic device of metamorphosis is again widespread, and the eponymous lyric indicates that the poet's alienation has already passed beyond the stage of mere vegetative transformation to reach a condition of almost total inanimacy, symbolized by the wilderness of fallow-land:

L'acqua tramonta
sulle mie mani erbose.
Ali oscillano in fioco cielo,
làbili: il cuore trasmigra
ed io sono gerbido,
e i giorni una maceria.

Water darkens on my grassy hands. Wings quiver in a limp sky, transiently: my heart migrates and I am left fallow, and my days are rubble.

Equally startling in the same collection is the orphic insight resulting from the poet's imaginative juxtapositions which cause a dilation of reality. Spatial expansion, for instance, is clearly implied in the following juxtaposition:

Mite letargo d'acque:
la neve cede chiari azzurri.(24)

Gentle lethargy of waters: the snow yields clear azure pools.

Nevertheless, this technique alone is not sufficient to raise the poet out of his state of alienated existence, and so he soon reintroduces into his poetry the muted humanism of his deeper atavistic urges.

The particular route he chooses at this juncture to seek relief from his solipsist position involves him in direct communion with the regenerative humours of the earth. In one lyric even his relations with his mistress become a form of vegetative growth:

Fatto ramo
fiorisce sul tuo fianco
la mia mano.(25)

My hand, changed to a branch, flowers on your flank.

In another he describes the orphic dream in terms which makes its radiance shine through the very dissolution of the flesh in its bier:

Muove nei vetri dell'urna
una luce d'alberi lacustri:
mi devasta oscura mutazione,
santo ignoto: gemono al seme sparso
larve verdi:
il mio volto è loro primavera.(26)

There moves in the glass of the bier a light of lakeside trees: a dark mutation destroys me, an unknown saint: green larvae moan in the scattered seed: my face is their spring.

It follows, therefore, that the attitude implied by the process of decomposition is not as negative as it first seems; for, beyond the physical process, there remains a deeper state of consciousness in which the corpse's mysterious insights are illuminated by dense, if submerged, images like ‘una luce d'alberi lacustri’. In the last resort Quasimodo's vegetative decomposition is indeed no more than a means to an end: an attempt to awaken subtle responses in the reader's mind by simultaneous bifocal allusions to realist and orphic planes of existence. In this respect the lyric ‘Nell'antica luce delle maree’, is a key poem of this collection, just as ‘Vento a Tíndari’ was a key to the preceding one. In the first place it is another idyll dealing with the poet's desire to re-evoke in its totality the dreamlike atmosphere of his island home. Yet it has another function as well—to foreshadow an orphic rebirth upon a more satisfying lyrical plane by means of a deployment of imagery representative of a ritual descent into the hallowed light of the tides.

To achieve this mystic, watery descent the effect of the flow of the word-music is as important as the images describing it, so that the poet fuses together his image-chains to form a complex, allusive vision of beauty enveloped in a delicate musicality. In the opening stanza there is again an interplay of light and dark vowels carefully graded to diffuse their richness outwards and illuminate the image of the dreaming trees:

Città d'isola
sommersa nel mio cuore,
ecco discendo nell'antica luce
delle maree, presso sepolcri
in riva d'acque
che una letizia scioglie
d'alberi sognati.

Island city submerged in my heart, behold I descend into the ancient light of the tides, near tombs on the banks of waters which liberate a joy of dreamed-of trees.

If then we bear in mind the human anguish already pent up in the Quasimodean tree-symbol, we can interpret the movement from sadness to ‘letizia’ as a melodic regression towards an infolded orphic humanism. It amounts, in fact, to a further extension of the poet's atavism, symbolized by ‘sepolcri in riva d'acque’, and provokes a kind of ritualistic descent into the great memorial storehouse of the sea. Together these symbols highlight the composite atmosphere of the poet's island paradise, and we note that its shadowy eternity implies a form of ‘convivenza’ submerged in his childhood memories. The latter in turn absorb, as if by osmosis, the lingering cultural echoes of Magna Graecia and the dramatic tensions of present-day Sicilian life; so that henceforth the poet's technique of ‘watering’ the silk of his imagery will create a fresh hermetic pattern, one which will permit him to wind back his memories to the point where he can communicate with a central core of ancestral experiences lying deep within his historically attuned sensibility. The transfigurative process involves a vitalistic communion with the grass-roots of sentient life, clearly expressed in visceral analogies of vegetative growth:

E i tuoi morti sento
nei gelosi battiti
di vene vegetali
fatti men fondi:
un respirare assorto di narici.

And I sense your dead in the jealous heartbeats of vegetative veins made less profound: a meditative breathing of nostrils.

Since life and death are now inextricably intertwined and the rising of the green fuse is linked with a slightly carnal, though largely meditative, quivering of the nostrils of the dead, what can we conclude? That the themes of the first two of Quasimodo's collections involve an aestheticized form of orphism in which the spirit is intended to emerge, almost instinctively, through refined sensations. The principal elements of the subject-matter are, first, an atavistic yearning for communion with the poet's forefathers and, second, a kind of Dantesque descent through the hierarchy of Being—from the rational to the sensitive and ultimately to the vegetative soul. Despite its promise of joy through decay, such a theme clearly possesses its own internal tensions which lead to a spiritual crisis in the next volume, Erato e Apòllion.

In this collection Quasimodo is faced with the stark choice of opting for a metaphysical or an ethical approach to art. He had either to continue to tread the regressive and ultimately solipsist path of his former hermetic inspiration or else to exploit his still dimly perceived vision of an orphic humanism. A clash of interests is already apparent in the very title of the work, since it juxtaposes the Greek Muse of love-songs and the biblical demiurge Apollyon. However, some ambiguity still persists in the play on words between Apollo and Apollyon, which actually derive from the same root. What finally emerges, however, is that the poet's tendency to blend rational and associative modes of inspiration has not led him to an Apollonian state of serenity: it has simply provoked a desire for self-destruction or self-immolation on the marmoreal altars of a solipsist type of art.

From Quasimodo's analysis of love in the lyric addressed to Erato we can deduce the nature of his échec. In this poem his failure to reach a higher plane of perception has already reduced his Muse to a frigid angel-symbol. So from his own godlike pose of egocentricity and solitude he now regards his relations with her as a supreme example of soul-death:

Per averti ti perdo,
e non mi dolgo: sei bella ancora,
ferma in posa dolce di sonno:
serenità di morte estrema gioia.(27)

To have you I lose you, and I do not grieve: you are still beautiful, motionless in a gentle pose of sleep: the serenity of death, an extreme joy.

This attitude of lyrical exasperation and of complete detachment represents the nec plus ultra of hermetic experience, amounting virtually to a form of gratuitous suspension. Its manifestations range from a feeling of impending catastrophe to a sense of futility; and so in the lyric ‘Apòllion’ we see a nihilistic resignation completely encompassing the poet's mind:

L'ora nasce
della morte piena, Apòllion;
io sono tardo ancora di membra
e il cuore grava smemorato.

The moment of complete death is born, Apollyon; I am still weary of limb and my heart lies heavy, steeped in oblivion.

A spiritual wasteland of metaphysical quality and proportions thus proves to be the inevitable outcome of Quasimodo's solipsist lucubrations; yet precisely because of his built-in humanist tendencies a way of escape already seems at hand. He soon realizes that his melancholy is not rooted in any a priori defect in the human condition, it derives from his inability to communicate as a man and as a poet. The remedy he proposes is to delve more deeply into an emotional and instinctive way of life in order to reformulate in social terms a ‘convivenza del sangue’ (‘living together through the blood’), as indicated in ‘Nel giusto tempo umano’:

Ci deluse bellezza, e il dileguare
d'ogni forma e memoria,
il labile moto svelato agli affetti
a specchio degli interni fulgori.
Ma dal profondo tuo sangue
nel giusto tempo umano
rinasceremo senza dolore.

Beauty deluded us, and the melting away of every form and remembrance, the fleeting motion unveiled to the affections through the mirroring of inward splendours. But from the depths of your blood in a just human time we shall be reborn without anguish.

Here then the poet's metaphysical ‘tempo mitico’ (‘mythical time’) is gradually yielding to a ‘tempo sociale’ (‘social time’) and the implications of the change become more and more significant as he matures.

The struggle preceding rebirth is foreshadowed in the lyric ‘Canto di Apòllion’, despite its mythical allusiveness. In it Apollo and Apollyon merge their natures, the former representing the splendour of the humanist tradition and the latter presumably the destructiveness of all neo-symbolist and hermetic aberrations from its canon. The poem opens with a description of one of Apollo's earthly exiles, normally a prelude to amorous adventure:

Terrena notte, al tuo esiguo fuoco
mi piacque talvolta,
e scesi fra i mortali.

Earthly night, sometimes I enjoyed myself in your exiguous fire, and I descended among the mortals.

There follows a coupling of the God with what appears to be an archetypal Earth-Mother, a theme frequently associated with Apollo because tradition has it that he begot many children by mortal women as well as by nymphs. Nevertheless, this particular coupling seems sterile and, when the God obtains no response from the ‘creatura notturna’, he feels alienated from all human activities:

Amavo. Fredde erano le mani
della creatura notturna …

I loved. Cold were the hands of the creature of night …

His rejection of life then transforms him into a God again, under the guise of the New Testament destroyer, Apollyon; and so, what was originally intended as a fertility rite, ends in a meaningless solipsist state of isolation and damnation:

Mio amore, io qui dolgo
senza morte, solo.

My love, I grieve here, deathless and alone.

Consequently the dichotomy of the poet's metaphysical and humanist yearnings have now led to a point of crisis and the Apollo-Apollyon antinomy symbolizes his split personality—the struggle raging in his mind between the convolutions of hermetic art and his burgeoning desire to participate whole-heartedly in the rapidly changing world about him. As might be expected, this titanic struggle is once more waged against a background of apocalyptic desolation.

In the poem ‘Sul colle delle “Terre bianche”’ with its abstract orphic landscape the poet accordingly imagines himself to be the sole survivor of some dreadful metaphysical calamity. To depict it he has further recourse to the tree-image, because it alone is capable of expressing his anguish:

Dal giorno superstite
con gli alberi mi umilio.
Assai arida cosa …

A survivor from day, I humble myself with the trees. An extremely arid object …

The outcome of this feeling of barren solitude is that he is forced to adopt at the end of the poem a Mallarmean stance as a star-gazer while at the same time struggling desperately to raise his soul-searing experiences to an immortal geometrical plane, mirrored in the peacefulness of a constellation of stars:

O la quiete geometrica dell'Orsa.

O the geometrical silence of the Great Bear.

Similarly, his sense of soul-death is now fetishized in ‘Airone morto’ through his recourse to an image of this bird stuck in the mud of a marsh, just as Mallarmé's swan was once stuck in the frozen lake of contingency. And again in ‘Al tuo lume naufrago’ a confused religious probing appears to lead to a Leopardian ‘shipwreck’, as the poet reaches the very limits of his human purview:

Sradicato dai vivi,
cuore provvisorio,
sono limite vano.

Uprooted from the living, with my makeshift heart, I am a vain limit.

On the other hand, the vegetative imagery previously seen in Oboe sommerso now seems paradoxically to offer a means of spiritual escape through the senses. A positive ‘naufragio’ (‘shipwreck’), for instance, takes place along the banks of a Sicilian river in ‘L'Anapo’, where a drowning is first followed by the normal processes of decomposition and then later by a kind of meditative rebirth. When the dead body finally floats ashore, a new life at once begins, in fact, to stir like a dream within the very putrefaction of the flesh; and during this process life and death appear to be subtly interchanged, suggesting that a secret form of metamorphosis governs the entire image-chain:

Sale soavemente a riva,
dopo il gioco coi numi,
un corpo adolescente:
Mutevole ha il volto,
su una tibia al moto della luce
rigonfia un grumo vegetale.
Chino ai profondi lieviti
ripatisce ogni fase,
ha in sé la morte in nuziale germe.

There softly rises to the shore, after jousting with the gods, an adolescent body: his face is changing, on his shin a vegetative growth swells in the play of light. Leaning over a profound ferment, he suffers each phase once more, he has death within him as a nuptial seed.

In short, the sterile substance of the dead body gradually becomes a fertile potentiality of orphic, or perhaps even of humanist, life, and in the hero's mysterious dream a woman plays a significant part, prompting his possible resurrection as a new Adam:

In fresco oblío disceso
nel buio d'erbe giace:
l'amata è un'ombra e origlia
nella sua costola.

Descending into a fresh oblivion, he lies in the darkness of the grasses: his beloved is a shadow, eavesdropping in his rib.

Appropriately, a number of Montalian animal fetishes or stimuli round off the lyric and consolidate its evocation of an airy, wakeful death. These hallowed creatures inhabit a sphere whose liquid translucence raises the poetry to a higher state of lyrical grace:

Mansueti animali,
le pupille d'aria,
bevono in sogno.

Docile animals, their pupils airy, drink in a dream.

It seems, therefore, that the lyric foreshadows a fresh conception of existence on Quasimodo's part. Although still orphic in quality, it points the way towards a silencing of his metaphysical demon and also, in part, to a muting of the ‘antiche voci’ (‘ancient voices’) of his Sicilian forebears which had hitherto sapped his sense of immediacy. In their place we find that his spirit is gradually being opened to the possibility of a more balanced, authentic, and socially orientated form of living.

The result of his broader outlook is the collection entitled Nuove poesie (1936-42). Its imagery is cast in a clear Leopardian mould while at the same time we find that its prosody is gradually working its way back, as Ungaretti's did earlier, to the traditional hendecasyllable. The major effect which these two changes have on Quasimodo's lyrical texture is that they make it less impressionistic and allusive in its unfolding; so that instead of the fulminatory analogy we are now frequently presented with the closely woven, connective tissue of the classical simile and metaphor. Furthermore, the lyrical tension of the poet's new style tends to inhabit the entire melodic line rather than the isolated word or symbol, and such a change implies that the cult of the parola-mito (‘word-myth’) is definitely on the decline. It does not disappear entirely until much later, but already its stark metaphysicality is gradually being replaced here by something more akin to the emblem or the allegory, both of which will be characteristic of Quasimodo's humanist period.

In the broadest sense the emphasis on content as opposed to form in the present collection indicates the poet's reconciliation with his human condition after his brief excursion among the gods in Erato e Apòllion. From this point onwards he will try to integrate and harmonize his verse by responding immediately to the emotional pressures of life, and not mediately by adopting distant reflective attitudes. Similarly changes are also brought about in his dominant landscapes, and gradually northern scenes become more common than southern ones despite the fact that a residual Sicilian aura still persists in certain of his image-chains. Typical examples of the poet's coming to terms with northern landscapes are his scenic descriptions in ‘Sulle rive del Lambro’ or ‘Sera nella valle del Màsino’. But behind them, too, there still lingers an orphic perspective, though often representing a spring-like rekindling of hope in spite of the inevitably darker skies evoked and certain residual autumnal or winter settings:

Gli alberi tornano di là dai vetri
come navi fiorite.
                                                                                                              O cara,
come remota, morte era da terra.(28)

The trees emerge from beyond the window-panes like flowering ships. O my dearest, how remote death was from the earth.

The poet's optimism is largely produced at this stage by his willingness to participate wholly in the realities about him. His closer commitment, moreover, has a further effect on his landscapes, making them less generic and less detached than they were earlier. So, in place of the former geometrical patterns and shadowy hermetic outlines, we now find concrete and variegated scenes filled with hosts of scampering children, leaping animals, birds, plants and flowers, all symbolic of the poet's new-found interest in the active life of the senses. These talismans of living joy are intended to be spiritually positive²⁹ and are to be contrasted with his earlier metaphysical images which were spiritually negative in their implications. It thus seems as if Quasimodo's world is now becoming rejuvenated from within, and an indication of this rejuvenation is the resurrection of the ‘airone morto’ (‘dead heron’) previously depicted in Erato e Apòllion. There, we noted, it was a symbol of the poet's despair, but here it deliberately seeks out life again against a background of allegorical and emblematic features:

… già l'airone s'avanza verso l'acqua
                    e fiuta lento il fango tra le spine,
                    ride la gazza, nera sugli aranci.(30)

… already the heron moves towards the water and slowly sniffs the mud among the thorns, the magpie laughs, black against the orange-trees.

Needless to say, the water-symbol is now an allegory of commitment and no longer a parola-mito acting only as a speculative or metaphysical representation of the life-flow. While even the chattering of the magpie in the tree is symbolic of human ‘convivenza’, although the bird retains a touch of orphic mystery by revealing to us nothing more than its dark silhouette. In consequence, Quasimodo can be seen to have purposefully dilated the meaning of his hermetic symbolism in the Nuove poesie and to have gone far towards enriching it with a broad emotional charge.

This open and widely based lyricism is maintained even when his landscapes occasionally revert to a Sicilian pattern, so that island-scenes are now normally presented in a concrete and historical, as well as in an orphic, perspective. A case in point is the poem ‘Strada di Agrigentum’ where historical associations are half-emergent from atavistic resonances and where the classical rhythm of the hendecasyllable further contributes to the toning down of the brittle, abstract nature of the poet's hermetic style. Its landscape is also made emotionally dynamic by the evocation of wild horses, through whose manes an atavistic wind whistles as they gallop slantwise over the Sicilian plains:

Là dura un vento che ricordo acceso
nelle criniere dei cavalli obliqui
in corsa lungo le pianure. …

There a wind lingers which I remember burning in the manes of horses galloping obliquely over the plains. …

What is significant about this description is its pure existentiality; yet its deep sense of pounding life is still provided with a historical perspective, by an allusive regression to the atmosphere of Ancient Greece. Appropriately the wind stimulates the recall of the historical past as it gnaws at the hearts of the ‘telamoni lugubri’ (‘lugubrious telamones’) which lie upturned on the grass and breathe forth the bitterness of their ancient brooding souls. But after this regression we are brought back, equally suddenly, to the present as we hear the recurrent strains of the modern Sicilian peasant's Jew's-harp mingling with the breeze. Under the pure light of the morning star the music echoes and re-echoes within an almost surrealistic landscape, while all around there lingers in the air an aura of secret saracen culture as a carter tramps up a moonlit hill surrounded by the whispering of olive trees. This then is the poet's multidimensionality of evocation at its best, and he uses hermetic and neo-symbolic techniques to reflect Sicily in its many orphico-historical facets:

E piú t'accori s'odi ancora il suono
che s'allontana largo verso il mare
dove Espero già striscia mattutino:
il marranzano tristemente vibra
nella gola al carraio che risale
il colle nitido di luna, lento
tra il murmure d'ulivi saraceni.

And the more you grieve if you hear the sound again as it moves away towards the sea where Hesperus at dawn already slides: the Jew's-harp sadly twangs in the throat of the carter who reclimbs the hill glistening with moonlight, slowly amid the murmur of Saracen olive-trees.

A similar transitional poem which moves away from hermetic techniques towards multiple humanistic tensions is ‘Davanti al simulacro d'Ilaria del Carretto’. The opening scene is set on the mainland, in the cathedral of Lucca, where the poet muses over the effigy of Ilaria sculpted by Iacopo della Quercia at the turn of the fifteenth century. Quasimodo feels himself trapped in a dead world like the person buried in the tomb, a fact which is strongly emphasised by an evocation of the indifference of today's young lovers as they stroll along the banks of the Serchio. In fact, the entire situation has an alienated, decadent flavour about it, rendered impressionistically by the description of an autumnal atmosphere which contrasts with the gay colours of the girls' dresses:

Sotto tenera luna già i tuoi colli,
lungo il Serchio fanciulle in vesti rosse
e turchine si muovono leggere.
Cosí al tuo dolce tempo, cara; e Sirio
perde colore, e ogni ora s'allontana,
e il gabbiano s'infuria sulle spiagge
derelitte.

Already under a tender moon your hills, along the Serchio girls in red and blue dresses lightly move. As in your gentle age, my dear; and Sirius grows faint, and each hour more distant, and the seagull rages over the forsaken beaches.

Here the final image of the lonely seagull crystallizes the mood as effectively as does Montale's kingfisher, making the dead woman's solitude and the poet's plight almost coincide. And yet, if anything, his solitude is even more intense than Ilaria's because he is at last beginning to realize the full extent of his hermetic alienation. His solution to his predicament is to try and transcend lyrically the twin states of indifference and death which he senses around him, and he hopes to do so by re-establishing emotional bonds and human values in a world now turned sour by cowardice and bitterness:

                                        Gli amanti vanno lieti
nell'aria di settembre, i loro gesti
accompagnano ombre di parole
che conosci. Non hanno pietà; e tu
tenuta dalla terra, che lamenti?
Sei qui rimasta sola. Il mio sussulto
forse è il tuo, uguale d'ira e di spavento.
Remoti i morti e piú ancora i vivi,
i miei compagni vili e taciturni.

The lovers go gaily in the September air, their gestures accompany shadows of words which you recognize. They have no piety; and you held by the earth, what do you lament? You have remained here alone. My shuddering is perhaps yours, similar in its anger and fear. Remote the dead, and even more the living, my base and silent companions.

To be successful, such transcendence must clearly be of a ‘social’ order, although it seems as if Quasimodo's underlying view is that it should also acquire a mythical aura. What he is now attempting to create is perhaps a sense of solidarity between the living and the dead on the one hand and all the individuals living in contemporary society on the other, despite the stultifying political pressures of the fascist era. In this sense the poem's much more tractable imagery and open emotion are refreshing draughts after his previous involution; and these qualities are conveyed by a softening of the angular contours of his imagery and by subtle syntactic and melodic adjustments within his poetic line to ensure a broader range of understanding between the poet and his reader. Indeed, as his integration into the wider Italian tradition proceeds, he gradually adopts a more placid and balanced outlook towards life, after which his corruscating, though still somewhat monolithic, hermetic symbols tend to die away in proportion to his acceptance of his social responsibilities. At length the change becomes so marked that, instead of the almost neurotic, metaphysical tension of his earlier verse, we come across a note of human melancholy in ‘Già la pioggia è con noi’ and it develops significantly out of a softly-moulded northern landscape:

Già la pioggia è con noi,
scuote l'aria silenziosa.
Le rondini sfiorano le acque spente
presso i laghetti lombardi,
volano come gabbiani sui piccoli pesci;
il fieno odora oltre i recinti degli orti.
Ancora un anno è bruciato,
senza un lamento, senza un grido
levato a vincere d'improvviso un giorno.

The rain is already with us, it shakes the silent air. The swallows skim the dead waters near the Lombard lakes, fly like gulls over small fish; the hay smells beyond the garden fences. Another year is burnt, without a lament, without a cry being raised unexpectedly to win back one day.

From this change we can conclude that, whereas his previous abstract and infolded landscapes were symbolic of his hermetic attitudes, his present gentler and humane ones are stylistic reflections of a gradual social redimensioning of his inspiration.

On the other hand, despite the relative transparency of this type of lyricism we note that the concrete features making up the poet's scenic aggregates, like the rain, stagnant pools, silent air, birds, fish, and other fetishes, all remain the same in both phases of his career. At most the poet is simply making his style and sensibility more supple, he is not radically changing his basic object-symbols nor the topology of the inner landscapes of his mind. Some object-symbols, however, especially his animal fetishes, now seem to be rekindled from within, and the increasing density of their emotive charges punctuates the gradual opening of his lyrical structures. Hence at this stage we encounter a subtle combination of a traditional lyrical discourse with occasional telescopic images harking back to his former hermetic style; and, not surprisingly, this delicate hermetic undertow actually ensures the unity of his inspiration.

The point becomes self-evident in the next collection Giorno dopo giorno (1947). This volume was written during the war and sums up Quasimodo's responses to a wide range of wartime sorrows, renunciations and disappointments. By that time he had finally created a tentative narrative style imbued with a steady lyrical charge in place of his earlier pent-up flashes of insight produced by a deliberate dislocation of syntax. Equally the realistic content of these poems now lends itself readily to rapid transformations of mood, though from the outset we need perhaps to distinguish between Quasimodo's wartime poetry and the general course of resistance poetry in Italy. As Cherchi has explained,³¹ true resistance poetry was developed after the war as a ‘ripensamento’ (‘reappraisal’), in answer to a need to rebuild democratic values; it was not a reaction to the atrocities perpetrated during the war itself nor to the human problems then troubling the consciences of mankind. Yet it was with these latter problems that Quasimodo was almost entirely concerned, and so he offers us no definite solutions, only his personal reactions to man's unremitting inhumanity to man. If he looks ahead at all it is to an impending European crisis, and he employs the horrors of war as emotive pegs on which to hang a wide range of moral reflections. The message which emerges from Giorno dopo giorno is consequently a traumatic acknowledgement of the insane brutalities of the period and a distant recognition of hope and possible regeneration—qualities already latent according to Quasimodo in the Italian social fabric at a time when the human spirit still seemed most inadequate before endlessly repeated acts of violence.

Oddly enough, by identifying himself with the then corporate will to survive, the poet suddenly found himself for the first time communicating freely with his fellow men. Like Victor Hugo before him, he momentarily became the ‘écho sonore’ (‘sonorous echo’) of the general mood of his day, even though his attitude was predominantly an elegiac one which sorrowfully contemplated the reduction of life to its lowest common denominator of physical survival:

                                                                                                    La vita
non è questo tremendo, cupo, battere
del cuore, non è pietà, non è piú
che un gioco del sangue dove la morte
è in fiore.(32)

Life is not this tremendous, dark beating of the heart, it is not pity, it is no longer anything more than a ruse of the blood where death is in flower.

The touchstone of the whole collection is thus a need for faith and steadfastness which will enable the values of civilization to be reasserted as soon as hostilities cease. The point is stressed in ‘Alle fronde dei salici’ in which, while concealing none of its horrors, the poet hints at the survival during the war of the nobler qualities of self-sacrifice and fortitude. In so doing, he even adopts a biblical tone, one which contrasts present-day barbarity with the age-old Christian compassion inherent in Western society.

This religious note was, in fact, not a new element in Quasimodo's verse, since it can occasionally be detected even in his earliest compositions. But during his hermetic period it posed a major aesthetic and emotional problem, because the juxtaposition of Christian images and overt pagan rituals was, to say the least, disconcerting. But at the present stage any reservations we might harbour about the validity of the poet's religious feelings are less readily entertainable, because he now uses religion simply as a deeply felt, spiritual background to colour his humanist outlook. As such, it becomes a repository of moral and social wisdom, almost a ‘binding together’ in the original sense of the word. This explains why the 136th psalm rises authentically to his lips in the above-mentioned poem, because its theme deals with a situation of oppression and slavery similar to that which prevailed in Europe during the Nazi occupation. Furthermore, the very texture of the poem emphasizes once again the tremendous changes brought about in the poet's style during the harrowing period of his wartime experiences:

E come potevamo noi cantare
con il piede straniero sopra il cuore,
fra i morti abbandonati nelle piazze
sull'erba dura di ghiaccio, al lamento
d'agnello dei fanciulli, all'urlo nero
della madre che andava incontro al figlio
crocifisso sul palo del telegrafo?
Alle fronde dei salici, per voto,
anche le nostre cetre erano appese,
oscillavano lievi al triste vento.

And how could we sing with the foreigner's foot upon our hearts, among the dead abandoned in the squares on the grass hardened by ice, amid the lamblike bleating of the children, amid the black howling of a mother rushing up to her son crucified on the telegraph-pole? As an offering, on the willow boughs our lyres too were hung, quivering slightly in the sad wind.

Such a transformation is proof of Quasimodo's contention (contradicting an equally well-known one made by Serra during the First World War) that, far from changing nothing, ‘la guerra muta la vita morale di un popolo,’³³ (‘war changes the moral life of a people’). It also suggests that morality and aesthetics will henceforth be closely interrelated in his work, as indeed proves to be the case.

The reintroduction of a sense of social responsibility leads at first to his adoption of a denunciatory tone whose fire-and-brimstone effects again recall the medieval fervour of a Jacopone da Todi. For a time, in fact, Quasimodo took an interest in the form of the medieval Lauda, and later, in 1958, he wrote an essay on Jacopone in which he describes him as the first ‘legittimo engagé’³⁴ (‘legitimate engagé’). His interest in the medieval poet was naturally more social than religious, and he confessed that at times the latter's religious fervour overstepped the bounds of art. But his committed style nevertheless helped to reawaken Quasimodo's own conscience and inspired his newly-found desire to participate in life. By means of a reimmersion in social affairs he was convinced that he could overcome that sense of alienation he felt had dogged his steps throughout his pre-war career, and at the same time he made it quite clear that the closed delights of his erstwhile hermetic paradise were now gone for ever:

Giorno dopo giorno: parole maledette e il sangue
e l'oro. Vi riconosco, miei simili, o mostri
della terra. Al vostro morso è caduta la pietà,
e la croce gentile ci ha lasciati.
E piú non posso tornare nel mio eliso.

Day after day: accursed words and the blood and the gold. I recognise you, my kin, o monsters of the earth. At your bite pity has collapsed, and the kindly cross has forsaken us. And I can no longer return to my Elysium.

Even so, despite his mildly vituperative attitude he still does not eliminate hermetic features from his verse altogether; he simply feels that he can no longer regard them as the bedrock of his inspiration. The success of Giorno dopo giorno depends, therefore, on his ability to strike just the right note between admonition and regret to capture the sympathy of the reader. Such a procedure evokes an atmosphere of mutual understanding between the two, in which the reader feels sure of the poet's solidarity when he is faced with the horrors of bestial crimes and mass-murder.

Possibly this new ethos grew out of Quasimodo's contempt for the bombast of the fascist era and his suspicion that the hermetic movement had by then declined to such a state of decadence that he felt the only way to describe it was as the ‘estremo antro fiorentino di fonemi metrici’³⁵ (‘ultimate Florentine lair of metrical phonemes’). His intention was to replace its empty verbiage with the emotive richness of the human heart, and it is on this sense of inner maturity that he hoped to found his post-war cultural outlook:

                                        Le parole ci stancano,
risalgono da un'acqua lapidata;
forse il cuore ci resta, forse il cuore …(36)

Words weary us, rise again from stone-lashed water; perhaps the heart remains, perhaps the heart …

In other words the poet had now finally turned his back on the decadent tradition of moral abstention and was well on the way towards a new conception of the function of art, one which—while having many left-wing features—was not to be envisaged in any pedestrian, political sense but as a valid means of reintegrating the artist into society.

An appreciation of the need to retain his own self-coherence during his change of direction accounts for the continuing presence of Quasimodo's hermetic archetypes like ‘acqua’ or ‘cuore’ in his verse. But their symbolic quality is rapidly being transformed and his principal modes of communication are now dramatically lowered from a metaphysical to an emotional level. As this reduction takes place the poet replaces the symbolic involution of his youth with the fable or allegory, which he believes will more adequately represent the moral rehabilitation of the post-war world. Accordingly, another virtual pullulation of plant and animal fetishes now tends to dramatize his fresh emotive manner, even though this joyous concourse of living creatures is still offset by the occasional presence of the faintly ‘allegorized’, hermetic emblem. The device reappears, for instance, with great clarity in ‘La muraglia’, where the admittedly more relaxed image of a wall nevertheless still reminds us of Montale's stark metaphysical image in the lyric ‘Meriggiare pallido e assorto’, on which it seems distantly modelled:

E già sulla muraglia dello stadio,
tra gli spacchi e i ciuffi d'erba pensile,
le lucertole guizzano fulminee;
e la rana ritorna nelle rogge,
canto fermo alle mie notti lontane
dei paesi. Tu ricordi questo luogo
dove la grande stella salutava
il nostro arrivo d'ombre. O cara, quanto
tempo è sceso con le foglie dei pioppi,
quanto sangue nei fiumi della terra.

And already on the wall of the stadium, among the fissures and the clumps of hanging grass, the lizards flash like lightning; and the frog returns to the ditches, a steady song to my distant nights in remote villages. You remember this place where the large star greeted our shadowy arrival. O dearest, how much time has flowed away with the leaves of the poplars, how much blood in the rivers of the earth.

But henceforth the emblematic basis of his poetry will never again militate against the expression of the poet's enthusiasm for life, and this very fact stresses how profoundly his lyrical perspective had been modified as a result of his post-war attempts to convey a greater range of feeling.

The first experimentation with what Anceschi has called ‘la distensione della parola’ or broadening of poetic style comes in Giorno dopo giorno. One particularly noticeable aspect of the process is the emotive use that Quasimodo now makes of the adjectives accompanying his archetypal object-symbols. The aim behind such adjectival shading is twofold: first to emphasize the horror which the poet feels when confronted with human suffering and bondage, and second to retain at least a touch of ‘existentialized’ hermetic mystery in his lyrical atmospheres. We can often divide these adjectival effects into two broad categories: those conveying an allegoric atmosphere of gloom and corruption through phrases like ‘giorni corrosi’ (‘corroded days’), ‘valli fumanti’ (‘smoking valleys’) or, even more apocalyptically, ‘i derelitti resti della terra’ (‘the forsaken remains of the earth’), and those tending to subvert his previous hermetic symbols by giving them negative instead of positive meanings. A typical example of this corrosive trend is the phrase ‘sull'erba dura di ghiaccio’ (‘on the ice-hardened grass’), in which the water-symbol is metamorphosed into ice and its crystallization is employed for the quenching of the vitalistic drive formerly present in the vegetative symbol of the grass. The same thing also occurs in the treatment of the various sub-symbols of the water archetype, and the process accounts for such descriptions as ‘fiumi carichi di sangue’ (‘rivers laden with blood’) or the obliteration of whole landscapes by ‘fumi maligni’ (‘malignant smoke’). In short, most of these expressions reiterate the inhuman message seen previously in the intractable symbolism of an ‘acqua lapidata’, and a similar aura of frigid indifference is also detectable elsewhere. Again, the grass itself at some points becomes an ‘erba maligna’ (‘malevolent grass’) and merges diffidently with a ‘grigia pianura’ (‘grey plain’) to produce a moral and metaphysical picture of ennui and despair. Likewise, the long-abandoned angel-image is implicitly pressed into service at this point to describe the rising moon as a ‘gelida messaggera della notte’ (‘cold messenger of the night’). But, regretfully, such naïve allegories often have a deleterious effect on the poet's imagination, and they mark too coarse a broadening of his once refined hermetic modes of inspiration to be wholly effective.

On the other hand, certain compensatory and regenerative undercurrents are also to be found in Giorno dopo giorno and they may be illustrated by the poet's deployment of further adjectival techniques for the purpose of creating atmospheres of hope. Most of them are again fulminatory or vegetative in nature, as in the phrase ‘le lucertole guizzano fulminee’ (‘the lizards flash like lightning’), which the poet claims is indicative of an ‘oscuro sortilegio della terra’ (‘obscure sorcery of the earth’). Their residual hermeticism undoubtedly marks the effective limits of the changes which have taken place in the poet's sensibility, although even when he is technically most involuted he now no longer tries to be the harsh interpreter of elemental sensations drawn from the very periphery of perception: he aims rather at becoming a purveyor of human sentiment which at times can even degenerate into a cult of sheer sentimentality. He is not so much concerned, in short, with producing ‘un grido per tentare il mondo fermo’ (‘a cry to tempt the closed world’) as with his ability to stretch his sensibility in a humanist—just as he once stretched it in a speculative—sense. The image of the ‘corvo’ (‘crow’) in ‘Una città lontana’ later proves to be a case in point. The poet tells us himself that it no longer functions as a hermetic symbol, it is a ‘corvo vero’ (‘true crow’) or real-life figure which seeks to integrate itself with its immediate surroundings and seems to perform a fine balancing act between commitment and aloofness. From here on he hopes through similar figures to evoke those inarticulate truths which lie unexpressed in any given society and represent its inner frustrations, yet which, when clearly formulated by the poets of that society, sum up its deeper aspirations and reassert not only the solidarity of its various members but also, by extension, the spiritual compresence of an entire nation in travail.

Such views indicate that Quasimodo was now attuned not merely to the aspirations of post-war society in Italy, but also to the deeper European crisis. As we know, this crisis was destined to lead to a far-reaching reappraisal of social conditions and to equally profound changes in taste. Nevertheless, it was one thing to be aware of the crisis and be able to represent its troubled transitional states and quite another to solve its aesthetic problems, and this Quasimodo ultimately failed to do. So, since Giorno dopo giorno was, lyrically speaking, an undoubted success, we have to attribute its effectiveness to the fact that Quasimodo was astute enough to choose just the right moment to transform his earlier elegiac poetry into a sustained paean of praise for humanity's post-war struggle to restore its dignity. What, on the other hand he was certainly incapable of bringing about was a solution to the impending lyrical crisis of the period. Hence the volume stands at most as a brilliant exercise in aesthetic opportunism, modulating in a neo-hermetic key the alternating states of euphoria and despair apparent during the immediate aftermath of the war. On the other hand, as soon as this initial mood of anguished hope aspired to something more substantial, the poet's melodic line proved insufficiently resilient to carry the burden, and he never managed to break away effectively from his previous modes of expression. Indeed, when on occasion he sought fresh pastures, his verse often tended to degenerate into a confused and somewhat sentimentalized internationalism.

Precisely because Quasimodo managed only to reflect his inner crisis in Giorno dopo giorno and was quite unable to resolve it, his next volume of verse La vita non è sogno (1949) is something of a disappointment. One might even be tempted to regard it as a throwback to his earlier hermetic style if it were not for an obtrusive narrative strain which tends to be dispersive of its lyrical effects. His manner of proceeding at this point in his career is to indulge in a certain number of experiments of a propagandist nature, in the hope of discovering an appropriate lyrical resonance for his post-war moods. One such experiment, for instance, is ‘Dialogo’, and others the lyrics ‘Anno domini MCMXLVII’ and ‘Il mio paese è l'Italia’. In them the poet's diffuse manner can no longer be held in check by the residual hermetic compression of his imagery, and so the balancing trick he successfully performed earlier in Giorno dopo giorno between his parola-mito (‘word-myth’) on the one hand and his poesia-cronaca (‘chronicle poetry’) on the other is not repeated. Admittedly, a compromise still does at times emerge between these two incompatible tendencies, but it is only effective when powerful hermetic pressures dominate the existential tensions on which the poems are based.

In the finer lyrics we sense that northern landscapes and attitudes of mind are now more apparent than ever. But, although Quasimodo will henceforth seem fully reconciled to life in his adopted land of Lombardy, sporadic attempts to merge northern scenes with faraway Sicilian memories are still indirectly revived, showing that the vivid topography of his island-home continues to be a force to be reckoned with in his sensibility despite his assertions to the contrary:

La luna rossa, il vento, il tuo colore
di donna del Nord, la distesa di neve …
Il mio cuore è ormai su queste praterie,
in queste acque annuvolate dalle nebbie.
Ho dimenticato il mare, la grave
conchiglia soffiata dai pastori siciliani,
le cantilene dei carri lungo le strade
dove il carrubo trema nel fumo delle stoppie,
ho dimenticato il passo degli aironi e delle gru
nell'aria dei verdi altipiani
per le terre e i fiumi della Lombardia.(37)

The red moon, the wind, your colour as a woman of the North, the wilderness of snow … My heart is now in these meadows, in these waters clouded by mists. I have forgotten the sea, the heavy shells blown by Sicilian shepherds, the singsong of the carts along the roads where the carob-tree quivers in the smoke of the stubble, I have forgotten the passing of the herons and the storks in the air of the green uplands for the land and rivers of Lombardy.

So, although we have seen these broad, diffusive trends developing from afar, it would perhaps be true to say that the line of demarcation between his centrifugal humanist inspiration and his former centripetal hermetic strain still continues here to be wafer-thin.

The finest poem in the collection is ‘Quasi un madrigale’ with its delicate offsetting of allegorical and metaphysical elements. In the first stanza the dominant mood is still hermetic and involves an atavistic descent into a closed world of intimate feelings. However, towards the end there is a clear attempt to establish a balance between esoteric imagery and more extravert emotive forces, between generic and more circumstantial lyrical situations:

Il girasole piega a occidente
e già precipita il giorno nel suo
occhio in rovina e l'aria dell'estate
s'addensa e già curva le foglie e il fumo
dei cantieri. S'allontana con scorrere
secco di nubi e stridere di fulmini
quest'ultimo gioco del cielo. Ancora,
e da anni, cara, ci ferma il mutarsi
degli alberi stretti dentro la cerchia
dei Navigli. Ma è sempre il nostro giorno
e sempre quel sole che se ne va
con il filo del suo raggio affettuoso.

The sunflower inclines towards the west and day already sinks in its ruined eye, and the air of summer thickens and already curves the leaves and the smoke from the boat-yards. This final trick of the sky moves away with a scurrying of clouds and a hissing of lightning. Again, as for years, dearest, the changing of the trees enclosed in the region of the canals has detained us. But the day is still ours, and it is still that sun which departs with the thread of its friendly rays.

The contrast between the cataclysmic world of the sunflower and the realistic picture of the ‘Naviglio’ area in Milan again reveals here that the poet's hermetic involution is slowly yielding to a more recognizably social pattern of evocation—to an understanding of normal human activities involving a sense of tranquillity and a limited feeling of contentment. But it is to be noted that once more the same archetypes persist as before (especially the tree-image), though they are now no longer metaphysical symbols of anguish but emerge naturally from his new emotional outlook and carry along with them an overt allegorical charge. What they have lost or are about to lose is in other words the last vestige of their metaphysicality, because they are now being redimensioned as a background to a social myth. The humanist implications of this reconstituted pattern are detectable in the closing lines of the poem, where emphasis is placed not on wartime violence but on the dignity and sanctity of life. Thus the symbolism at this stage no longer turns its dark and opaque side towards us but deliberately remains open to inspection. Its lyrical charge, moreover, is hardly ever fulminatory and apocalyptic, but imaginatively controlled and firm. As such, it stresses the poet's anxiety to communicate, both emotionally and conceptually, his desire to put an end to his erstwhile pose of alienation by reintegrating himself into the real life of his age. He therefore hopes at this point to draw directly from his social ethos the values which give intrinsic meaning to his experiences:

Qui sull'argine del canale, i piedi
in altalena, come di fanciulli,
guardiamo l'acqua, i primi rami dentro
il suo colore verde che s'oscura.
E l'uomo che in silenzio s'avvicina
non nasconde un coltello fra le mani,
ma un fiore di geranio.

Here on the canal bank, like children with our feet swinging, we look at the water, the lower branches dipped in its green colour as it darkens. And the man who is approaching silently does not hide a knife in his hands, but a geranium flower.

It will be instructive to examine the symbolism of this passage more closely. Its object-symbols are still largely identical with those expressed in, say, ‘Acquamorta’ but their lack of involution and obscurity at once show us that the poet had moved far along the road towards a modern humanism in the interval. Accordingly, single objects do not now appear as isolated monolithic images depicting the limits of human aspirations, they act instead as integrated units within a placid but richly textured poetic discourse. For instance, the darkening water is no longer a sealed hermetic symbol of despair but a purely descriptive element, despite its residual link with the greenness of vegetative decomposition. Likewise, the geranium-image contrasts starkly with the violent use of the same symbol as if it were a bloodstain spattered on a wall in ‘Lettera’ in Giorno dopo giorno:

                                        O mia dolce gazzella,
io ti ricordo quel geranio acceso
su un muro crivellato di mitraglia.

O my sweet gazelle, I recall for you that burning geranium on a wall peppered by machine-gun bullets.

In other words the symbol is now a pliant image of hope for the restoration of human values, not a brittle metaphysical conceit; and so it blends far more successfully than his earlier monolithic images with Quasimodo's new poetic tone. This suggests that he was finally about to abandon the involuted processes of his pre-war verse for a metaphorical manner much more adherent to post-war reconstruction. Indeed, as he becomes more passionately committed to the realities of the post-war era, the elements of his poetic landscaping no longer stand out like so many metaphysical irritants against an inert atmosphere of noia, but merge into a series of plastic descriptions suggestive of the tranquil flow of a settled and harmonious way of life. In this sense ‘Quasi un madrigale’ foreshadows a solution both to the poet's technical and spiritual problems, because it is neither committed to his associative nor to his narrative manners: it represents instead a subtle combination of the two. Its structure is similar to those essentialized chronicles of events we associate with Eliot or Pound, although Quasimodo does not seem fully to have appreciated the nature of his own achievement. He thus allowed other poems in this collection to decline either into a kind of diaristic impressionism or into anecdotal, documentary and procès-verbal forms of composition.

Nowadays we associate the poem-document with Marxist poets, since they tend to assume that ‘reportage’ is the best artistic way of coming to grips with social realities. However, Quasimodo was never obsessed by the crudities of dialectical materialism, he simply shared, as Gide did before him,³⁸ its active ideal of humanism. In espousing the Marxist cause, his at first unrecognized but clearly long-term aim was simply to introduce a touch of documentary leavening as an undertone into his newly formulated lyricism of universal brotherhood. He was indeed already half-aware of the fact that to identify himself too closely with political facts in his poetry would be aesthetically dangerous, and so he pointed out that authentic humanist poets like Giovanni Della Casa ‘non tollerano cronache, ma figure ideali, atteggiamenti: la storia della poesia per loro è una galleria di fantasmi’³⁹ (‘do not tolerate narrative, but ideal figures, attitudes: the history of poetry is for them a gallery of phantasma’). By this he meant that it is the poet's underlying attitude to reality which represents his genuine lyrical substance, not the crude elements of reality themselves, which art should first try to digest and then transcend. As long as the ‘social’ or ‘humanist’ poet bears this fact in mind his imagery will continue to possess those tentacular roots capable of plunging down to the innermost reaches of his personality and guaranteeing the authenticity of his vision. Once he allows himself to ape social reality without interpreting it, on the other hand, he stands little chance of ever creating a valid form of art.

This attitude also implies that he was aware of the necessity to combine ethics with aesthetics in modern artistic processes, a fact which explains why he continues to reassert the importance of aesthetic values in his post-war poetry, even though such values seemed to be largely discounted in the practices of the avanguardia of the fifties and sixties. He observed, for instance, at the time that moral and social judgements could only be effectively expressed in poetry through ‘la sua resa di bellezza’ (‘its rendering of beauty’), because ‘la sua responsabilità è in diretto rapporto alla sua perfezione’⁴⁰ (‘its responsibility is in direct relation to its perfection’). Accordingly, we are not surprised to find him still using emblems or rather ‘fantasmi’ in ‘La vita non è sogno’ as vehicles for his moral indignation. In this respect he replaces his erstwhile ideal of Apollo with that of Orpheus, though an Orpheus who is a singer of human emotion and no longer a mystical priest. The latter's post-war aim was in his view to bring about a regeneration of the human spirit, as Quasimodo himself previously had claimed to do in his slogan of ‘rifare l'uomo’⁴¹ (‘remake man’) as early as 1946:

E tu sporco di guerra, Orfeo,
come il tuo cavallo, senza la sferza,
alza il capo, non trema piú la terra:
urla d'amore, vinci, se vuoi, il mondo.(42)

And you, Orpheus, filthy with war, like your horse, without the whip, raise your head, the earth no longer shudders: shout with love, conquer, if you will, the world.

Unfortunately, the figure of Orpheus is now too closely modelled on the ideologically motivated propagandist to offer a convincing solution to life's problems, and even the poet's own attitudes oscillate dangerously between ideological and sentimental extremes. At first he confines his attention to the expression of an ineffective, humanitarian horror directed against the bestiality of war, but the lyrical slackness which this style produces normally prevents him from rising above the level of the documentary narrative. Cases in point are those poems in which he sets himself up as the indignant moral chronicler of mankind's misdeeds, as for instance in his descriptions of battlefields or concentration camps:

… Là Buchenwald, la mite selva di faggi,
i suoi forni maledetti; là Stalingrado
e Minsk sugli acquitrini e la neve putrefatta …(43)

There Buchenwald, the gentle wood of beeches, its accursed ovens; there Stalingrad and Minsk on the water-meadows and the putrefied snow …

In the wake of such examples of facile denunciation we begin to detect a regrettable bifurcation in his art, which henceforth will consist of the rich neo-hermetic textures we found in ‘Quasi un madrigale’ on the one hand and a rather more pedestrian, left-wing expressionism on the other.

The principal defect in Quasimodo's post-war documentary technique is in other words his tendency to emphasize participation at the expense of perspective. As a result, he is often unable to synthesize his moods, since he allows his imagery to adhere too closely to raw facts. His present inability to establish a position of sufficient detachment is thus the very opposite from that which afflicted him in his early verse when his main shortcomings, we recall, were a cult of solipsist detachment and a complete incapacity to participate in life. Hence in the two most significant phases of his literary career he seems to be alternating between the Scylla and Charybdis of over-detachment and over-commitment; and so it was only on relatively rare occasions that he managed to achieve a sufficient spiritual equipoise to produce a balanced lyric which would fully live up to the undoubted richness and subtlety of his poetic vision.

Almost as a reaction against the excesses of emotion in La vita non è sogno we find certain orphic overtones reappearing in the next collection, Il falso e vero verde (1956), the very title of which is no doubt still to be associated with the vegetative imagery dominant from ‘Acquamorta’ to ‘Quasi un madrigale’. In this collection an example of essentialized narrative with renewed orphic, rather than purely social, implications is ‘Le morte chitarre’. Its point of departure is once more a memorially recreated Sicilian scene and its object-symbols are highly personalized and difficult to interpret. The poem may be addressed to either or both of Quasimodo's wives, the first of whom was dead by the time of its composition and the second estranged.⁴⁴ Their ‘contingent’ relations with the poet are, however, offset by his ‘idealized’ view of the pure and eternal beauty of Sicilian womanhood reflected in the detached world of the brief link-stanza, where young girls comb their hair with nymph-like grace in the mirror of the moon:

                                        Nello specchio della luna
si pettinano fanciulle col petto d'arance.

In the mirror of the moon girls with orange-like breasts comb their hair.

Once again we notice in this lyric the recurrence of all the poet's significant talismans: trees, water, sulphurous flashes, horses and so on, but now they are again recombined with a dreary marshland atmosphere, probably indicative of the noia of old age. To these archetypes are also added a few dramatic but largely atavistic symbols like ‘coltelli’ and ‘ferite’, which tend to identify the associations of the scene with dark Sicilian passions:

Chi piange? Io no, credimi: sui fiumi
corrono esasperati schiocchi d'una frusta,
i cavalli cupi, i lampi di zolfo.
Io no, la mia razza ha coltelli
che ardono e lune e ferite che bruciano.

Who weeps? Not I, believe me: over the rivers run exasperating cracks of a whip, dark horses, flashes of sulphur. Not I, my race has knives which gleam and moons and wounds which burn.

Essentially, therefore, the poem is a blend of mythicized, memorial elements and occasional vivid images of age-old Sicilian folklore, while its artistry consists of a form of historical allusiveness again standing half-way between an open discourse and the poet's formerly involuted hermetic manner.

Gradually, however, the technique of the lyrical chronicle tends to gain the upper hand over Quasimodo's closed hermetic world, as we would normally expect in a poet determined to reintegrate himself into society. By reaction, he frequently commits himself whole-heartedly to the intricacies of his own personal life in the hope of compensating for the immense sense of solitude resulting from old-age and his growing despair. In another poem of the same collection a third feminine figure, Rossana Sironi, emerges and her death also greatly distresses the poet. Similarly, in the eponymous lyric ‘Il falso e vero verde’ itself, the uniqueness of a single human life seems to be valued above everything else, and its innate beauty and authenticity are contrasted elegiacally with the meaningless cyclical pattern of nature which represents a false flowering. The poet now draws a Leopardian type of consolation from Rossana's passing, and the anguished meditations she prompts remind us of a similar anguish in Leopardi's ‘A Silvia’:

                                        E tu non fiorisci,
non metti giorni, né sogni che salgano
dal nostro al di là, non hai piú i tuoi occhi
infantili, non hai piú mani tenere
per cercare il mio viso che mi sfugge.

And you do not flower, you do not bring forth days nor dreams which rise from our world beyond, you no longer have your childlike eyes, you no longer have tender hands to seek out my face, which flees from me.

The message in this collection accordingly reasserts the importance of human relationships, first on a personal and then on a social level; and for this reason the poet uses both the absurdity of death and the unfeeling cycle of nature as lyrical foils.

The social element becomes even more evident in the section Quando caddero gli alberi e le mura, whose cataclysmic title clearly stresses the poet's sense of the imminent collapse of civilization. The opening composition is a powerful Laude written after the manner of Jacopone, in which Quasimodo practises a starker realism than ever before. At the same time the poesia-cronaca acquires a new dignity in ‘Ai fratelli Cervi, alla loro Italia’, which proves to be a restrained and resilient memorial to seven patriots killed in the partisan struggle during the war. Both these compositions intensify their lyrical effects by drawing again on distant cumulative, hermetic features, as indeed did ‘Le morte chitarre’, although in a more subdued manner. But, by contrast, the poem ‘Auschwitz’ reveals all too evidently the limitations of the genre, because its dramatic and allusive qualities are diluted either by too close an approximation to the facts of the situation or by an overt indulgence in sentimentality:

Da quell'inferno aperto da una scritta
bianca: ‘Il lavoro vi renderà liberi’
uscí continuo il fumo
di migliaia di donne, spinte fuori
all'alba dai canili contro il muro
del tiro a segno o soffocate urlando
misericordia all'acqua con la bocca
di scheletro sotto le docce a gas.

From that open Hell hung with a white inscription: ‘Work will set you free’ there issued forth continually the smoke of thousands of women, driven out at dawn from their hovels and put against the wall as target-practice or suffocated as they cried for pity to the water under the gas-showers with their skeletal mouths.

The collection La terra impareggiabile (1958) shares the same merits and demerits as its predecessor, although its imagery is, if anything, less hermetic and its social propaganda more accentuated. The incomparable land to which the title refers is the real, everyday world of the toiling masses, to which the poet now feels himself inexorably bound. Consequently, he asserts that ‘un poeta è tale quando non rinuncia alla sua presenza in una data terra, in un tempo esatto, definito politicamente. E poesia è libertà e verità di quel tempo e non modulazioni astratte del sentimento’⁴⁵ (‘a poet is such when he does not abandon his presence in a given land, in a precise time, defined politically. And poetry is liberty and freedom of that time and not abstract modulations of feeling.’) Oddly enough, its first section is yet a further redimensioning of his Sicilian dreamworld, re-evoked within Leopardian moonlight tonalities; and yet at the same time its neo-hermetic symbols are now still further dilated to carry a much smoother flow of emotion. The pessimism and disillusionment of previous years seem therefore to disappear at this point, and in lyrics like ‘Visibile, invisibile’ we find a reborn enthusiasm for life beneath the serenity of its Leopardian halftones. In other words Quasimodo's haunting Sicilian memories are now fully integrated into the wider understanding of existence that the poet has gained from his long sojourn on the Italian mainland. This accounts for the almost infinite allusiveness and luminosity of his settings which provide his thoughts with a deep and humane perspective:

Visibile, invisibile
il carrettiere all'orizzonte
nelle braccia della strada chiama
risponde alla voce delle isole.
Anch'io non vado alla deriva,
intorno rulla il mondo, leggo
la mia storia come guardia di notte
le ore delle piogge.

Visible, invisible the carter on the horizon in the folds of the road calls and replies to the voice of the islands. Even I do not drift aimlessly, about me rolls the world, I read my life-story as a nightwatchman reads the rainy hours.

Such a serene and comprehensive outlook is the final outcome of the gradual fusing of orphic and historical elements into a temperate form of wisdom. The poet's manner is no longer as hermetically infolded as it once was nor does it operate upon a virtual surrealist plane to create alchemistic memorial linkages like those encountered in ‘Le morte chitarre’. It works instead in a largely allegorical sphere in which symbolic and realist elements are made to stand in almost perfect reciprocity. This second ‘distensione’ (‘dilation’) of Quasimodo's poetic language thus reaches its highest point in this collection, a fact which may be illustrated by comparing the figure of the ‘carrettiere’ in the present composition with the ‘carraio’ appearing in ‘Strada di Agrigentum’. The latter, despite the already partial opening of the poet's imagery, still tended to possess a certain metaphysical aura about him, indicative of a secret symbolic function, while the proper foil to the present figure is, by contrast, the ‘carrettier’ (‘carter’) in Leopardi's ‘Il tramonto della luna’ where consolatory allegorical implications offset the stark contingency of the human life-span. The last two figures, in short, are symbolic of life's fitful pilgrimage, whereas the former has a narrower involuted, non-historical function. This means that the poet attains to a higher degree of communicativeness whenever his verse no longer proves solipsist and discontinuous in quality but is realistically based and objective, depicting a wealth of social experience as well as his own personal sense of fulfilment. Henceforth he will consider human life to have value in itself and he speaks of the richness of individual memories and their shadowy concreteness rather than of the limitations imposed by death or by hermetic perspectives:

Non mi preparo alla morte,
so il principio delle cose,
la fine è una superficie dove viaggia
l'invasore della mia ombra.
Io non conosco le ombre.(46)

I do not prepare myself for death. I know the principle of things, the end is a surface where the invader of my shadow travels. I do not know the shadows.

Perhaps then the best way of defining the ultimate nature of his humanism would be to claim that it attempts the deepest form of self-possession of which the mind is capable while simultaneously acknowledging the coexistence of a similar self-possession in other minds. To achieve such a degree of humanistic maturity the ‘vert paradis’ of Quasimodo's youth is at this stage widened dramatically to produce a full-blown social reality with deeply-felt moral overtones. In the process the poet sloughs off the speculative attitudes of hermeticism and replaces them with the connective tissue of a purely emotive discourse —one which continually asserts the poet's readiness to participate fully in everyday life.

From such a humane climate Quasimodo considers that the authentic personality will more readily emerge, and he now uses as his symbol of a fully-developed character the figure of his own father. He had, in fact, long admired his father's rich constructive humanity, his compassion for others, and his unerring ability to adjust to circumstances. So he highlights his positive approach to life by mirroring it in his behaviour during the Messina earthquake, when he offered comfort to his own family and practical help to the bereaved. His father is thereby transformed into an emblem of man's disinterested and hopeful endeavour in the service of others:

Il tuo berretto di sole andava su e giú
nel poco spazio che sempre ti hanno dato.
Anche a me misurarono ogni cosa,
e ho portato il tuo nome
un po' piú in là dell'odio e dell'invidia.(47)

Your beret of sunshine went up and down in the brief space that they always allotted to you. For me too they measured out everything, and I have carried your name a little beyond hate and envy.

In the second section of La terra impareggiabile, on the other hand, the poem-chronicle tends to predominate. The section's very title, Ancora dell'inferno, gives us the measure of the poet's anguish and sense of commitment, while his mode of lyrical presentation is now clearly allegorico-narrative in quality. For instance, in ‘Il muro’ the fate of the individual within the social complex is revealed in allusive terms against the background of a wider allegory of unceasing human toil:

                              Ogni tanto qualcuno precipita
dalle impalcature e subito un altro
corre al suo posto. Non vestono tute
azzurre e parlano un gergo allusivo.

Every so often someone falls from the scaffolding and immediately another runs to take his place. They do not wear blue overalls and speak an allusive jargon.

Similarly in the poem ‘Ancora dell'inferno’ itself we are presented with a terrifying allegorized scene, the utter devastation following a hydrogen-bomb attack. We have to admit that the poem produces a powerful effect through its fragmentary imagery which accurately reflects the stunned mood of incredulity among the survivors; but it nevertheless remains true to say that, in general, socially based allegories of this type can only have a limited lyrical resonance. Moreover, they tend to lack any resonance at all in poems like ‘Notizia di cronaca’ where Quasimodo experiments in a journalistic manner with the raw facts of a crime. All that this kind of inspiration can provide is indeed a historical justification for the poet's present social (or socialist) ethos; and in his last collection, Dare e avere (1966), Quasimodo will spend the remainder of his life working out his social Utopia's moral and aesthetic implications.

What is less marked in the collection is the sharp associative-conceptual dichotomy in the poet's earlier lyrical experiences. The climate is mainly reflective and, even though poems like ‘Dalle rive del Balaton’ are still largely documentary, most of the other lyrics are of a meditative nature, thereby proving to be authentic distillations from the poet's now integrated sensibility. In particular, he offers us a fresh insight into the cultural tradition by adopting the attitude of an interpreter of society's intimate needs and by attempting to define the rôle of the post-war poet. As a consequence, Dare e avere is neither wholly symbolic nor allegorical in quality but has the flavour of a reasoned discourse composed of an artful interfusion of both Quasimodo's previous lyrical manners.

Its dominant tone is provided by the poet's sense of mortality, since he had already by this time experienced several severe heart-attacks and the gloomy prognosis for the future had changed him into a kind of despairing optimist. During the entire period he felt as if he was living on borrowed time and this explains the shadowy chiaroscuro effects so noticeable in his imagery. Still, despite the sombre background to his inspiration the main theme of the collection remains a positive one and deals with the process of give-and-take within a regenerated society. Indeed, precisely because of his impending death the poet looks on life as a detached philosopher and warns others that it is only through a love for one's fellow men that one can hope to arrive at a state of happiness:

… ricorda che puoi essere l'essere dell'essere
solo che amore ti colpisca bene alle viscere.(48)

… remember that you can be the being of being only if love strikes you squarely in the viscera.

Within this overall outlook he examines both human virtue and moral turpitude and, although he equates rectitude with self-sacrifice, he no longer associates nobility of mind exclusively with a slack left-wing emotionalism. All that concerns him now is the full development of the individual within his social context, and he uses the symbol of a Russian nurse, Varvàra Alexandrovna, as an illustration of his ideal merging of one's social and personal consciences. While she looks after him during an illness in Moscow, she consequently becomes transformed into an emblem of human solidarity rising above a national to an international level:

… sei la Russia, non un paesaggio di neve
riflesso in uno specchio d'ospedale
sei una moltitudine di mani che cercano altre mani.

… you are Russia, not a snowy landscape reflected in a hospital mirror, you are a multitude of hands which seek other hands.

By pinning his faith to this kind of deeply felt humanitarianism Quasimodo is again able to introduce fresh chords into his lyricism, especially a tragic existential note which implies that all human life hangs by a single thread. The point is illustrated in ‘Una notte di settembre’ in which the elements of the poesia-cronaca are remoulded to provide a suggestive work of art.⁴⁹ The composition presents us with a new insight into the meaning of life which is now emergent from a whorl of memories, flashbacks and telescopic allusions; and yet its residual hermetic overtones in no way compromise the realities of the situation described.

Consequently, even when he was struck down by a mortal sickness, Quasimodo still strove to catch the inner lyrical resonances of his age, and he later explained that his post-war poetry sought to discover ‘un fine etico rapportato alla comunicazione’⁵⁰ (‘an ethical aim linked to communication’). Indeed, such a conclusion is already implicit as early as ‘Dialogo’ in La vita non è sogno, where Orpheus's descent into Hell to rescue Eurydice symbolizes a definite act of commitment. In contrast with the outcome of the classical myth, Quasimodo's modern Orpheus expects his lady to be revived and returned to him:

O non eri Euridice? Non eri Euridice!
Euridice è viva. Euridice! Euridice!

O were you not Eurydice? You were not Eurydice! Eurydice is alive. Eurydice! Eurydice!

This revived presence is, of course, an attempted prefiguration of that perfect symbiosis between the individual and society which the poet himself had hoped to realize in the post-war world. He once observed that ‘ciò che conta in chi scrive è la sua presenza umana mentre scrive’⁵¹ (‘what counts in those who write is their human presence while they write’); and so at that stage only when social and aesthetic tensions work in harmony did Quasimodo consider the human sensibility vibrant enough to formulate those inarticulate truths which release both the poet and society from their enslavement to the past.

The psychological basis for the poet's post-war development is accordingly his sense of being continually ‘disponibile’ or receptive in the Gidean meaning of the word. It led him to the conclusion that ‘umanesimo non può avere che un significato, oggi: la condizione dell'uomo nelle aperte domande della sua vita’⁵² (‘humanism can have only one meaning, today: the condition of man in the open demands of his life’). But, as we have previously hinted, he was never wholly successful in producing a lyricism measuring up to his aims, even though his premature death in 1968 cut short his poetic career when it was still full of promise and capable of greater artistic maturity. But in the last analysis whether he achieved his post-war aims or not is beside the point; it is his subsequent influence in the cultural world which is alone significant. This is still considerable, if indirect, because it was essentially his vision in the immediate post-war years which has guided contemporary poets towards a wider understanding of their lyrical potentialities.

Promise as well as achievement have accordingly to be assessed in any consideration of his poetic career and for these very reasons it is difficult to make any clear-cut estimate of his cultural position. In one sense he can be regarded as having achieved—virtually single-handed—the most significant change in literary attitudes since the early decades of the present century. But, by contrast, his post-war accomplishments in the field of humanist poetry are modest when compared with his more lyrically satisfying contribution to hermeticism. This can probably be explained by the paradoxical nature of his aesthetic practice in his later period, because on the one hand he expressed an almost avant-garde enthusiasm for innovation, while on the other he also reasserted the necessity for classical restraint in stylistic matters. No doubt it was this paradox which lay behind his and other writers' post-war artistic perplexity, for what in his later years he struggled to achieve was to free himself from the cocoon of solipsist procedures in which he had earlier become enmeshed. In his attempts at liberation he sometimes committed himself too readily to prevailing fashions, a trend which is particularly noticeable whenever he sails too close to the documentary wind. His overriding weakness at that stage was essentially one of failing to provide a coherent perspective, even though his critical intelligence unerringly perceived the general direction in which his inspiration ought to be moving.

At first sight it might seem as if his main problem was not one of prescribing the limits within which post-war poetry should operate but of freeing his aesthetics from its pre-war excrescences. For even his pre-war lyricism reached its highest level of perceptiveness only when in poems like ‘Vento a Tíndari’ he avoided too intense an involution of his imagery. Yet by means of a curious inversion of rôles we find that his post-war verse also attains a high level of intensity when its coarser narrative strain is interiorized by the raising of its imagery to a form of emblematic limpidity. Accordingly, whenever Quasimodo's inspiration wanes at this period, his poetry tends to display the major defects of both his manners, and it then becomes a gratuitous and perplexing chronicle of events.

During the change-over from the one approach to the other his object-symbols, as we have seen, tend to remain constant, the only difference being that those at the end of his career are no longer symbolically involuted but discursive and allegorical in implication. Advantages and disadvantages accrue from this process. In one sense the more relaxed emotional charge of the allegorical approach gives his poetry a broader spectrum and more humanity than the parola-mito, which all too often degenerated to a point of frigidity and provided only an imaginative mausoleum in which to preserve his fossilized emotions. Yet in another sense its distended range of feeling undermined the quartz-like resilience of his hermetic metaphors, and frequently any residual allegorical tension was then insufficient to save his verse from sinking into a morass of social banalities. Because of this slackening of tension we can readily understand why his finest post-war lyrics regress to the point at which his early and later manners intersect and why his authentic art still relies on a merging of hermetic and humanist features at the imaginative level. For it is solely on those occasions that he achieved a harmonious interblending of his two styles and succeeded in writing a poetry which ‘si transforma in etica, proprio per la sua resa di bellezza’⁵³ (‘is transformed into an ethic, precisely because of its rendering of beauty’). During the major part of his life his ‘tempo mitico’ (‘mythical time’) was truly out of joint with his sensibility, because he was unable to run the rhythm of his own highly perceptive conscience in double harness with that of society as a whole. However, despite his somewhat mixed success, we have nevertheless to consider Quasimodo as the chrysalis from which the poetry of present-day Italy ultimately developed. And for this reason his verse marks a new point of crisis and of partial solution to that crisis in the history of the twentieth-century Italian lyric.

Notes

1. G. Zagarrio: Quasimodo, Il Castoro 33, Florence, 1969, p. 33.

2. In Otto studi, p. 210.

3. G. Paparelli: ‘Humanitas e poesia di Quasimodo’, in Letterature moderne (1961), 734.

4. See introduction to Giorno dopo giorno (Milan, 1947).

5. In Quasimodo (Cedam, 1943), p. 33.

6. From ‘Una poetica’, in Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi (Milan, 1960), p. 23.

7. From Otto studi, p. 216.

8. From ‘L'angelo’.

9. From ‘A me pellegrino’.

10. See F. J. Jones ‘Osservazioni sulla simbologia di Quasimodo’, in Cenobio (May-June, 1961), 254-74.

11. In this respect we have to bear in mind Quasimodo's interest in Greek mythology and the fact that the central figure of orphic myth was the god Dionysus, who was originally a tree-god and often depicted as half-man and half-tree. We also recall the archetypal image of a tree in Rilke's Sonette an Orpheus, especially in sonnet 17 of the first part, where the tree has clear atavistic implications.

12. See O. Macrí: ‘La poetica della parola’, saggio introduttivo a Poesie di Salvatore Quasimodo, (Milan, 1938), pp. 11-61. This essay is now reprinted in Inventario (1961), numero unico, 18-41, from which all quotations are taken. Macrí sees a dichotomy in Quasimodo's work between a ‘poesia naturale’ and a ‘poesia geometrica’, but nevertheless claims that his figurative intention is to provide ‘una prova di esperienza totale’ (p. 25). Each word struggles to liberate a ‘fantasma’ which, like the angel-figure previously mentioned, becomes ‘una puntuale percezione di marmo’ (p. 27).

13. See F. Flora: ‘Salvatore Quasimodo: preludio sul lessico della poesia d'oggi’, in Letterature moderne (1951), 2. Reprinted in Scrittori italiani contemporanei (Pisa, 1952).

14. Antonielli notes, for instance, that ‘… si potrebbe stendere un elenco di parole da lui amate, che tornano e ritornano in vari componimenti e frasi … che sembrano a volte costituire pretesto d'avvio, una sorta di commozione su cui un'intera poesia tenti poi d'accentrarsi’ (op. cit., p. 71). Likewise Romano stresses the point in a general way by saying that ‘questo concepire il mondo come parola è in Quasimodo sovente un sentimento troppo insistito, che si irrigidisce in meccanismo’. (La poetica dell'ermetismo, Sansoni, 1942, p. 88.) Finally Tedesco states openly that ‘Spazio’ is an example of the poet's ‘immaginismo incomprensibile’ (op. cit., p. 41). When condemning the poet's archetypes in this way, however, we must always be careful to distinguish between mere repetition and a carefully conceived orphic ‘return’ of similar images which the poet uses to build up an appropriate atmosphere in his verse. It is presumably to his weaving of meaningless lyrical arabesques and their repetition that critics have applied the term Alexandrinism.

15. The splitting of landscapes into their constituent elements reminds us of the rending of the god in ancient orphism. The purpose was, of course, to illustrate the presence of the one in the many, and Quasimodo makes use of the anthropomorphized elements of nature as a means of mythicizing modern life, a practice he no doubt drew from ancient cultures.

16. For a detailed analysis of Quasimodo's image-chains, see my article in Cenobio mentioned earlier.

17. See, for instance, O. Macrí, ‘De Libero e la crisi del naturalismo poetico’, in Caratteri e figure della poesia italiana contemporanea (Florence, 1956), pp. 235-52.

18. From ‘A me discesa per nuova innocenza’, in Oboe sommerso (1932).

19. From ‘L'angelo’, in Oboe sommerso.

20. The ‘soave amico’ mentioned in the poem is Salvatore Pugliatti who reawakened Quasimodo's interest in poetry in 1929 and later encouraged him to publish Acque e terre. During this period the poet regularly crossed over from Reggio Calabria to meet him in Messina and they made several trips to Tíndari together, during one of which the poem was drafted. For Pugliatti's own account of these events, see ‘Preistoria di un colloquio amicale’, in Fiera letteraria, (17 July 1955). The article is republished in the above-mentioned number of Inventario.

21. Of Sappho's poetry Quasimodo wrote: ‘Pura è infatti la poesia di Saffo, espressa, cioè, con un linguaggio concreto e lineare—ignoto ai suoi contemporanei—la cui architettura rivela immagini forti, chiuse in una sfera, dove né un aggettivo, né un verbo possono penetrare.’ (In Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi, pp. 99-100.)

22. From ‘I morti’.

23. ‘Ma è un panteismo della memoria. Il passaggio da Acque e terre a Oboe sommerso è unicamente di densità: il moto prosegue, anzi si rinfranca.’ (In ‘La poesia di Quasimodo’, now reprinted in Inventario (1961), p. 112.)

24. From ‘Anellide ermafrodito’.

25. From ‘Senza memoria di morte’.

26. From ‘Metamorfosi nell'urna del santo’.

27. From ‘Sillabe a Erato’.

28. From ‘Sulle rive del Lambro’.

29. Quasimodo himself later refers to his ‘cari animali’ as ‘talismani d'un mondo appena nato’ in ‘Dalla rocca di Bergamo alta’, in Giorno dopo giorno (1947).

30. From ‘Ride la gazza, nera sugli aranci’.

31. Cherchi's point is put as follows: ‘Da noi non c'è stata una poesia della Resistenza, se mai è sorta dopo, come ripensamento; ma si può parlare di una poesia sulla Resistenza …’ (In Nuove dimensioni 20-21, (1964), p. 13.)

32. From ‘Lettera’.

33. In Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi, p. 27.

34. Ibid., pp. 119-26.

35. Ibid., p. 27.

36. From ‘Forse il cuore’.

37. From ‘Lamento per il sud’.

38. Quasimodo, for instance, would undoubtedly have accepted Gide's remark at the time of his conversion to Communism, to the effect that ‘… je prétends rester parfaitement individualiste en plein assentiment communiste et à l'aide même du communisme. Car ma thèse a toujours été celle-ci: c'est en étant le plus particulier que chaque être sert le mieux la société.’ (In Littérature engagée, N.F.R. ed., p. 85.) It seems then that G. Grana goes too far when he asserts that ‘l'imperativo della ‘realtà’ spesso è materialmente inteso da Quasimodo come in genere dai Marxisti. Realtà sono i fatti esterni, realismo per lui vuol dire passaggio dal ‘mondo intimo’ al ‘mondo esterno …’ (In Profili e letture di contemporanei, Milan, 1962, p. 230.) Probably the poet would not have gone further than G. Lukacs in his so-called worship of the material world, and would have acknowledged that ‘la novità decisiva e feconda è sempre un contenuto nuovo che proviene dal mutamento della realtà storico-sociale.’ (In Il Marxismo e la critica letteraria Turin, 1953, p. 11) On this subject, however, see also Quasimodo's essay entitled ‘Il poeta e il politico’.

39. From Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi, p. 48.

40. Ibid., p. 36.

41. Ibid., p. 17.

42. From ‘Dialogo’.

43. From ‘Il mio paese è l'Italia’.

44. The poet's two wives were Bice Donetti and Maria Cumani. He married Bice in 1927 and she was somewhat older than Quasimodo himself. She is described as the ‘donna emiliana’ in his poetry and was born at Cremona. She died in 1947 and her death is commemorated in ‘Epitaffio per Bice Donetti’ in La vita non è sogno. In 1949 he married Maria Cumani who had already borne him a child, Alessandro, some time earlier. Their marriage was not a happy one and the couple soon parted. It is for this reason that we read both of death and estrangement into this poem. I am indebted for the above information to Signora R. Quasimodo Samarelli and to Dr. D. E. E. Vittorini.

45. See Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi, p. 36.

46. From ‘Visibile, invisibile’.

47. From ‘Al padre’.

48. From ‘Solo che l'amore ti colpisca’.

49. For a full analysis of this poem, see my article: ‘Il nuovo periodo della poesia quasimodea’, in Nuove dimensioni 7, 3-11.

50. In ‘Domande a Quasimodo’, intervista di G. Finzi, in L'Europa letteraria 30-2, 24.

51. Ibid., p. 24.

52. Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi, p. 85.

53. Ibid., p. 36.