Pascoli and D'Annunzio

The works of Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Grabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) are representative of the spiritual unrest and decadent taste typical during the late 1800s in Italian literature. The late 19th-century in Italy was marked by a transformation in political, philosophical, and cultural ideas that resulted in a move away from faith in science and ration to produce absolutes toward mysticism, human senses, and Nature as the key to salvation. Despite the inclusion of the poetry of both Pascoli and D'Annunzio in the "Decadence" of the period, each poet developed a different form of poetry and different worldviews pertaining to Man's salvation.

For Pascoli, truth can only be seen through poetry, a supreme form of knowledge. However, in order to have the secrets of the mystical revelations possible through poetry, one must maintain a childlike spirit and awe when faced with the world's mysteries. In this we get Pascoli's main theme and preoccupation in "Il Fanciullino" or The Little Boy, a prose work that includes his poetry. Likewise, D'Annunzio's poetry celebrates the naturalistic and the sensual, but D'Annunzio's conception is far from little boy awe. Instead, D'Annunzio was influenced by Nietzsche's concept of the "superman." Many of his works glorify this concept and the Will to Power, as the poet saw in them his mode to a deeper life and the mysteries of human nature embodied in Nature.

ingly demonstrated his attitude of himself as "superuomo." Only the will and power of the artist can overcome the barriers that prevent awareness of the mysteries of Nature to D'Annunzio's way of thinking and creating. Despite the more "mature" Nietzschean focus of D'Annunzio's poetry, there is still a childlike nature to his idealism that is found in the works of Pascoli. For if Pascoli's "little boy" longs for what was and never can be again in many instances, so D'Annunzio's "superman" appears to have an adolescent mentality with respect to the individual. As Hinden (2002) maintains, "D'Annunzio romanticizes the hero's individuation, invests him with power to bend the community to his will, and, in the event of his failure, finds the community unworthy of his sacrifice," (2). In D'Annunzio's early poems like "Stabat Nuda Aestas" (Summer Stood Naked), we see that D'Annunzio nevertheless maintains a fond affection for the purely amoral and sensual. Even so, despite the speaker's obvious delight in the wonders of the female form, we see that it is Nature to whom the speaker is truly paying homage, "I saw her narrow naked foot / rush the high dry pine needles, / the shudder and flush of estuary air / a hot flash in her wh

Category: Literature - P