CARDUCCI, GIOSUÈ. - Poet, b. at Val di Castello (Pietrasanta) on 28 July 1835, d. at Bologna on 16 Feb. 1907. He spent his childhood in Versilia and his adolescence in the Tuscan Maremma, between Bolgheri and Castagneto: and he always afterward thought of both with nostalgia heartfelt. He studied at the schools of the Scolopi in Florence and at the Scuola normale superiore of Pisa. In '56 he led the little brigade of the Amici pedanti, fighting to the last against degenerate Romanticism, faithful from that time on to a program which he later (1891) formulated thus: "In politics, Italy above all; in aesthetics, classical poetry above all; in practice, sincerity and strength above all." In the autumn of that year he was called to teach rhetoric at the gymnasium of S. Miniato al Tedesco, where he published his first volume of Rime, which earned the praise of Guerrazzi and Mamiani. Settled in '57 at Florence, he met the publisher Gaspero Barbèra, who entrusted to him the fortunes of the "Collezione Diamante" of Italian classics.
He had been teaching for a few months at the lyceum of Pistoia when, in Aug. '60, the minister Terenzio Mamiani offered him the chair of Italian literature at the University of Bologna.
C. immersed himself more than ever in philological studies. The first work that won him fame as a distinguished scholar was the edition of the vernacular works of Poliziano (1863). But he did not entirely "shroud himself in the funeral sheet of erudition." In '63, after reading Michelet, Proudhon and Quinet, he wished to hymn Progress, in opposition to "Catholic obscurantism," in that Inno a Satana, which he himself later defined as a "chitarronata."
Throwing himself into the "democratic whirlwind," he impetuously expressed in the Giambi ed epodi the anxieties, the impatience and the wrath of the so-called "party of action." The volume Levia gravia (Pistoia 1868) passed almost unnoticed; nor did the volume of all his Poesie, published by Barbèra in '71, have much fortune. In the two following years C. composed new iambics and new poems, of the kind that would later enter the collection of the Rime nuove, and also some translations from Goethe, Platen and Heine, making amends for his former contempt for foreign literatures. After the publication of the Nuove poesie (Imola 1873), C. Hillebrand wrote that "Europe, Heine being dead, had not seen a poet arise equal to C." To his Italian critics he replied with the prose Critica e arte, which later formed part of the Bozzetti critici e letterari (Livorno 1876), his first volume of militant criticism. The 2nd edition of the Nuove poesie was published at Bologna in '75 by Nicola Zanichelli, who from then on became his publisher. The Odi barbare (1877) raised a great storm. But more attention was paid to the novelty of the metrical forms than to the novelty of the inspiration. Here too a German critic, C. Thaler, saw clearly: "... classical serenity breathes from every stanza that C. writes."
Having gone to Perugia for reasons of office, in July and Oct. of that year, made ill by the Franciscan landscape, he wrote the sonnet S. Maria degli Angeli and the Canto dell'amore, in which he envisages a curious and Jacobin reconciliation with the papacy. More significant is the invocation to peace and the prayer to St. Francis, which arises suddenly in a letter to Lidia (Perugia, 23 July 1877): cf. Lettere, XI, Bologna 1947, pp. 153-55.
From the time when, in Nov. '78, the visit of the new sovereigns to Bologna inspired in him the ode Alla Regina d'Italia, C. gradually drew closer to the monarchy. Noteworthy is his participation in Roman literary and journalistic life: especially his collaboration with the Cronaca bizantina (1881-84) of A. Sommaruga, who became the publisher of several of his works, beginning with the three series of Confessioni e battaglie. The house of Zanichelli, which in '82 had published the Giambi ed epodi, published in '87 the Rime nuove, and in '89 the first vol. of the Opere, which C. had the good fortune to be able to edit himself for the most part (up to vol. XVI). In 1890 he was elected senator. The last poetic collection, Rime e ritmi, is from 1899: but in prose he continued to write at least until 1904, when he published the study on Dante's canzone Tre donne. In 1904 an infirmity forced C. to ask to be put on the retired list. The minister V. E. Orlando had Parliament approve a law by which the State paid to C.'s old age (as already in '59 to that of Manzoni) an annual pension of 12,000 lire. European recognition of his poetry was the Nobel Prize of 1906: but it was a "titulus tumuli." The Queen Mother, who in 1902 had bought his library, leaving him its use, also bought in 1906 C.'s modest house, donating it together with the library to Bologna, which would enter into possession of it, transforming it into a museum, at his death. And in front of C.'s house, today the Museo Carducciano, a monument, the work of Leonardo Bistolfi, was inaugurated in 1928.
In 1901 C. gathered into a single volume all his Poesie (that is: Invenilia, 1850-60; Levia gravia, 1861-71; Giambi ed epodi, 1867-79; Rime nuove, 1871-1887; Odi barbare, 1871-81; Rime e ritmi, 1887-95, and the Canzone di Legnano, 1876); and in 1905 he gathered into a single volume his selected Prose.
School poetry, that of Invenilia: the young poet, a classicist in forms but already a classic in spirit, took up again the thread of the national literary tradition, which the second Romanticism had broken. The Levia gravia, although poems worthy of note are not lacking in them, do not seem an essential moment in Carducci's lyrical development. In the Giambi ed epodi C. returns to the lyrical satire of which the iambics of Archilochus and the epodes of Horace are examples, but he also has foreign examples in mind (A. Barbier, V. Hugo, E. Heine). It is true that political passion often bursts forth there in violent sarcasms and invectives, and that some of these iambics, action rather than art, have above all a documentary value, such as those against papal Rome and Pius IX: for Eduardo Corazzini; for Giuseppe Monti and Gaetano Tognetti.
A new C. is present in the Rime nuove: the "ancient ardor" has been succeeded by a "new peace"; and not only peace in C.'s heart, but aesthetic peace, an art that masters the tumult of passion. Wonderfully varied is this collection: the sonnets of book I and the ballads and rispetti of book II are a return to the fresh lyrical expressions of the first centuries of our literature; book III, with the Primavere elleniche, is a classical intermezzo in neoclassical forms, preluding the Odi barbare; book IV contains masterpieces of intimate poetry, such as the Idillio maremmano and Davanti a San Guido; books V and VI, masterpieces of historical poetry, such as Faida di comune and Ca ira; book VII, translations, as beautiful as beautiful original poems, of German poets and of ancient Spanish and French romances. In the Rime nuove two aspirations prevail: the poetry of history and the poetry of strong yet gentle affections.
The same duality of inspiration is found in the three series of Odi barbare, even if on rare occasions C. indulges in art for art's sake and rests in "chisel-work" (whence the legend of an Alexandrian and Parnassian C.). On the one hand, the heroic odes, such as the Roman ones, those of the Nemesi storica and those of the Risorgimento; on the other, intimate odes, which sing visions of Italian lands, sing love, family affections, friendship, memories, death and mystery. The barbare are called such out of a classicist's scruple ("because such they would sound to the ears and judgment of the Greeks and Romans, although intended to be composed in the metrical forms of their lyric, and because such they will unfortunately sound to very many Italians, although composed and harmonized of Italian verses and accents"), but they are the most classical thing that modern lyric possesses. Finally Rime e ritmi rejoin, through the rhymes, the Rime nuove and, through the rhythms, the Odi barbare. In this collection is the ode La chiesa di Polenta (1897), a historical reconsideration (cf. Alle fonti del Clitunno) on the civil and religious mission of the Church in the Middle Ages.
C. was no less great a prose writer than a poet. A little adorned in his early writings, comparable to the classicizing poetry of the Iuvenilia, he later knew how to join and blend living usage with literary tradition. His autobiographical and epistolary prose calls to mind that notable part of his poetic output which may be called "poetry of confessions." The author of the Giambi ed epodi lives again in his political and literary polemics. One feels the inspiration of C.'s great civil odes in the great orations, among them the one for "La libertà perpetua di S. Marino" of 1894, in which mention is also made of the presence of God in history.
In civil historiography he left sure marks; deeper ones in Italian philology, in history and in literary criticism. There is no period, genre, or notable writer of our literature that he did not scrutinize and evaluate. C.'s criticism consists of historical-aetiological reconstructions, for which he may be considered the Italian Sainte-Beuve, and of truly incomparable analyses, above all stylistic, of literary works.
In the letter of Dec. 23, 1905, two years before his death, to Countess Silvia Pasolini, C. thus defined his thought on religion: "I want to make my confessions: that is, I mean to say things which, after my death, will remove every doubt as to how I thought and believed. Let us begin at the beginning: from God, or from whoever is held to be God. Little more than a boy, I began a hymn to Christ thus: 'Io non so chi tu sia, né per che modo - Venuto se' quaggiù...', applying to Christ the verses that Dante placed in Ugolino's mouth. As a grown man, I wished to retract with words of my own what I had sketched offhand, especially in the Chiesa gotica: 'O inaccessibile re degli spiriti, - tuoi templi il sole escludono; - cruciato martire, tu cruci gli uomini, - tu di tristizia l'aer contami...', and in the Fonti del Clitunno: ... 'un Galileo - di rosse chiome il Campidoglio ascese, - gittolle in braccio una sua croce, e disse: - Portala, e servi'. - And certainly these are strong and unforgettable things. I confess that I let myself be carried away by the Roman principle, most ardent in me; and it was too much. But almost at the same time I thought and wrote gentle things about Christ: 'Oh, allor che del Giordano a i freschi rivi - traca le turbe una gentil virtù...'. It remains that whenever I was moved to declaim against Christ, it was out of hatred for the priests; whenever I thought of Christ freely and untrammelled, it was my intimate feeling. This does not mean that I renounce what I have done: what I wrote, I wrote: and the divinity of Christ I do not admit. But certainly some expressions are too much; and I, without adoring the divinity of Christ, bow before the Great human Martyr. This I want to be known, and I write it to you, because you are capable of saying it openly. Giosuè Carducci. And postscriptum: "Thoughts of Christmas Eve, which I have always had, and take account of them. G. C." (A. Messeri, Da un carteggio inedito di G. C., Bologna 1907).